What My Son Taught Me About Hope
(And Why It Works)
Hunter (my 6 year old) doesn’t care about my calendar.
He doesn’t care that I’m behind on a deadline or that my brain is trying to solve five problems at once. He doesn’t care that the meeting is “important.”
Hunter cares about one thing:
Am I here?
Not physically. Not technically. Not “I’m listening while I answer emails.”
Here.
And today, without meaning to, he gave me a lesson I think every adult needs right now:
You don’t build a better life by thinking about it harder.
You build it by showing up, on purpose, one small block at a time.
Let me show you what I mean.
So….this morning definitely wasn’t a heroic morning.
It was the kind of morning real life hands you when it wants to remind you who’s in charge.
Hunter wasn’t feeling great… poor little dude had been up most of the night, I think he vomited twelve times.
He caught some type of virus and had absolutely no energy, so he stayed home from school. And while he was disappointed about it, we slowed down, rearranged our day, and tried to make staying home feel a little less scary. (aka. we let him watch Stay Wild and Ben & Cam on YouTube with no time limit iykyk)
At one point, in between one of my runs to the kitchen to steal one of the cookies Meg made, he looked up at me from the couch and said something small… something he didn’t know was big.
“Dad… could you just sit with me for a second? Please?”
Not “can you turn on the TV.” Not “can I have a snack.”
Just… sit with me.
And here’s the thing… my brain immediately tried to negotiate…
Just send two emails first. Just knock out one quick thing. Just be efficient for five minutes and then you can be present.
Has anyone else ever been there?
Where your kid asks you for the simplest thing in the world and your brain starts running a cost-benefit analysis?
But Hunter doesn’t speak “efficient.” speaks present.
So I sat with him, no phone, no half-attention, just me and him and the quiet. And after a minute, his shoulders dropped. His breathing slowed down. He leaned into me like his whole body was saying… okay. We’re good now.
That’s when it hit me.
He wasn’t asking for my time. He was asking for my attention. And attention is the one thing we all pretend we have while we’re quietly giving it away to everything else.