"When I Grow Up, I Want to Be a Dad."

Encouragement from my five year old son

We were maybe twenty minutes into the drive home, early on a Sunday morning, when Lincoln said it.

We had just finished our second annual cousin camp, which we affectionately call Camp Wache Fausel (a combination of our last names). It is nine kids and four Dads and it runs out of a family friend’s house on the lake. The five youngest cousins stayed home this year, too little to come along. The nine who made it spent the weekend on Bible stories and BB guns, on catching catfish and shooting bows and arrows, on the kind of late-night, s’mores-and-campfire, sleeping-in-a-pile-with-your-cousins exhaustion that a six-year-old will fight off as long as he possibly can. By Sunday morning they were running on fumes. Lincoln was wrung out, but still too full of the weekend to let it go.

(A memory from Lincoln’s first week at camp)

He had been telling me his favorite memories from camp, and then there was a pause, and then: “Do you know what I want to be when I grow up?”

I said, “No, buddy. What’s that?”

I was ready for the usual answer. Police officer. Construction worker. Maybe fireman. There is a stretch of boyhood where every job worth having involves big vehicles and sirens.

Instead he said, “When I grow up, I want to be a dad.”

I have not been able to stop thinking about that. I realized that I don’t think I had ever heard a little boy say it before. Not mine, anyway. I can remember little girls saying they wanted to be a mom someday (although even this is rudely discouraged in culture today in favor of more “ambitious” vocations). But a boy reaching for “dad” as the answer? I was surprised.

I kept pressing him on it: “What do you mean, you want to be a dad? What do dads do?” And Lincoln, without missing a beat, began to list it out for me. A dad gets to do cousin camp. Drop us off at school. A dad does some workouts. A dad gets to marry a mom and have kids and make coffee. A dad makes his kids laugh and drives his car to work and stuff. “Those are all the things you’re good at, Dad,” he told me.

I will be honest, I was flattered. He is six, and his whole picture of what a man grows up to be was, more or less, informed by my week.

What we do, not who we are.

But, true confession, my first instinct, the reflexive one, was a flicker of something like worry or shame. Shouldn’t a kid associate his father with his work? Isn’t that the normal, the boy who says “my dad is a builder” or “my dad is a doctor,” maybe my job just isn’t very cool? Or had I somehow unknowingly obscured the part of my life where I actually earn the living that makes the rest of it possible?

The more I thought about it, though, the more I saw that Lincoln had not left the work out at all. It was right there on the list. He knows I go to work, that I drive my car, that I “do some meetings” as he says. It is not that he does not think I work. It is that to him, work is just a small part of who I am. He did not put it first, and he did not treat it as the thing that defines me. To him, work is something his dad does, not something his dad is. It sits on the list somewhere around making coffee and making kids laugh. The work is in there. It is simply not the whole thing.

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to turn this into a tidy little sermon about work/life balance or hiding your work so your kids never feel it. I don’t believe that.

We should be proud of our work. It is good for Dads to work. God has gifted us in unique ways to serve our neighbors and provide for our families and living that out carries with it an immense amount of dignity regardless of the cultural admiration surrounding the specific task. Further, when it comes to balance — not every father has a job that lets him take a Friday for cousin camp or take a Zoom call from the carpool line or be home for the long stretch between dinner and bed. I happen to have a flexible job right now, and I know that is a temporary gift and certainly not a virtue. I am not interested in making any other dad feel he is failing his kids because his shift does not bend the way mine does.

What struck me, instead, was something underneath all of that. Usually when a child tells you what he wants to be when he grows up, he is naming a vocation in the narrow sense, a job, some role out there in the world that he will go and put on someday like a uniform. Lincoln was not doing that. He was not picturing a life with no work in it. He was unknowingly looking through a more expansive lens, and through that lens “being a dad” was itself the thing to grow up and become, with the work folded inside it as one piece of a much bigger whole. He had the order right in a way that a lot of grown men, myself included, often get backwards.

Productivity and Presence

I do not write any of this down because I deserve a pat on the back. If anything, I write it because I am not especially good at the thing the story makes me sound good at, and my wife would be the first to tell you so, with love and a fair amount of evidence. Trying to mix work and family so I get the most out of both is not some skill I have mastered. More times than I would like to admit, I have texted Corinne something along the lines of “come get YOUR children before I do something I regret,” or “I am 100% done working from home,” or my personal favorite, “Four kids? What were we thinking?” I do not float serenely above the tension. I get frustrated by it constantly.

Because I do love work. I love advocating on behalf of kids who cannot advocate for themselves, solving hard problems, and leading teams. I feel like I was built for it, and most days I wake up wanting to give it everything I have. Sometimes that means getting up before anyone else is awake. Usually it means working a lot of odd hours. I may never fully figure out how to go all-in on the work while staying all-in at home with four very young, very impressionable kids. But this is my season, and trying to win at both is the game.

That is the other reason I write these moments down. I recap stories like this one because I need to remember them. I need them on hand for the next time an interview gets hijacked by a screaming child in the next room, a workout gets cancelled by a kid who won’t sleep, or pink eye sweeps through the house and rearranges my entire week without asking. Presence is not one grand gesture you make and then frame on the wall. It is unrewarded investment, in a million small areas, compounded over a long time, that one day leaves a visible mark.

And the stakes are not small. These are the formative years. My kids’ entire idea of what it means to grow up, of what men do with their days and how work is meant to be nested as one part of a man’s larger identity rather than swallowing it whole, is being built almost entirely out of what they watch me do right now. I want them to grow up understanding that my work is incredibly important but not the most important part of who they need me to be.

So, you try. You get up early, make the practices you can, answer emails while the house sleeps, and sometimes catch the surprise red-eye to be there when they wake up. You do it imperfectly, you send the occasional frustration text, pray for patience, and get up to do it again the next day. Because every so often a worn-out six-year-old turns to you on a Sunday morning drive and tells you, all on his own, exactly what he wants to be when he grows up. That is why you try.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Currently, I serve as the Executive Director of Them Before Us, advocating globally for the rights and well-being of children.

I am also the co-founder of All The Good, a leadership organization helping non-profits do all the good they are called to do.

I studied Cross-Cultural Ministry and Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership at Messiah and Wheaton. I read a lot and sleep less than I probably should.

My wife and I live in Charlotte, North Carolina with our 4 kids.