The Ways We Loved Them

Back when we were too busy parenting to fully understand how they were experiencing it.

Last month, the day before my hip replacement, Belinda and I were sitting around talking about our five grown kids and what it feels like to have them scattered across the country. I was was more reflective than usual having just completed Daddy Daycare for the summer with our son Austen and my grandchildren, Greyson and Harper. That experience got me thinking about the father I am now compared with the father I was when the kids were young.

Our conversation started with Jared, our youngest, who was preparing to move from Delaware to Arizona to work with his brother Dalton. From there, we moved into the kind of conversation parents have about their grown children, especially when most of them live far away.

Are they happy? What are they struggling with? How are their relationships? Where are they still growing? Eventually, the conversation turned back toward us.

What did we do well as parents? What didn’t we do as well? More interestingly, what was it actually like to be raised by us? What parts of us did they carry with them?

Belinda and I are very different people. We often use our astrological signs as shorthand for our marriage. I’m the Aries fire sign who starts the fire. Belinda is the grounded Taurus earth sign who knows how to tend it and keep the whole house from burning down. I was the doer. I coached the teams, cooked the meals, planned the adventures, and kept everyone moving. If something needed to happen, I was usually right in the middle of making it go.

For a long time, I thought that was how you loved people.

Belinda brought something different. She is much better at being still and present with the kids. She didn’t always need to fix something or make it happen. She could simply be with them.

For her birthday, Dalton wrote about what that felt like to him. He remembered times when she would turn off the lights, close the door, and massage his sore muscles from wrestling with essential oils. At a time in his life when connection was difficult, she helped him learn that being alone did not have to mean being lonely. Stillness could feel safe.

That is a pretty remarkable thing for a grown son to remember about his mom.

During another conversation that week, Dalton reminded me of something very different that he and his brothers had recently been laughing about.

Apparently, I once decided to torment a poor drive through attendant by asking whether he was trying to entrap me. When the confused young man asked what entrapment meant, I asked if he was a police officer. I then explained that if he actually was a police officer and denied it after I asked, that would be entrapment and therefore illegal. None of this was necessary. I was just being facetious. Which was the point. Dalton told me that some of his own tendency to joke with people in outrageous ways probably came from me.

Those two memories stayed with me because it occurred to me that neither Belinda nor I was consciously teaching anything in those moments. She wasn’t thinking, "today I’m gonna teach Dalt that stillness is safe and I wasn't thinking, "I’ll instruct the kids on how to confuse an innocent drive through attendant". We were just being ourselves . And, btw, it surprises me how often the kids bring up stuff from years ago that I just don't remember, yet I can see how powerful an experience it was for them.

Maybe that is how much of parenting actually works. Our children don’t only absorb what we deliberately teach them. They absorb how we inhabit the world.

In these memories, Belinda showed them that quiet could create connection. I showed them that ordinary life could be playful. She brought stillness. I brought motion. She helped everyone settle. I usually got everyone going.

Of course, playfulness wasn’t the only thing they experienced from me. I have always been a deep thinker and a question asker. Britney has requested more than once that I give the deep seated questions a rest. Fair request. Apparently, I wasn’t only keeping everyone in motion. I was also asking them to look underneath what was happening, whether they were in the mood for it or not.

A few years ago, our oldest son, Holland, gave us another glimpse into what the family had felt like from his perspective. At Thanksgiving, he presented us with a family crest he had created. The words he chose to represent us were passion, courage, and resilience. What a gift it was to hear what he believed our family stood for.

It would be tempting to wrap all of this into a tidy conclusion. Belinda gave them stillness. I gave them motion. Together, it all balanced out. But parenting doesn’t work that neatly, and neither did we.

One thing I’ve learned about myself is that doing things was easier for me than being present. Back then, I’m not sure I even understood the difference. Sometimes I was so busy loving through coaching, providing, fixing, and creating experiences that I wasn’t available enough to see what was happening underneath the surface. At times, I was distracted by my own stuff and did not take enough responsibility for being fully present. It took me a long time to understand that.

Some of that learning came the hard way. My tendency to keep moving and looking outward created problems in my life and relationships. There are reasons for that, but what matters more to me now is that I eventually learned to look inward too.

This summer, while spending Tuesdays and Thursdays with Austen and his children, I noticed that I haven’t stopped being the prankster, the coach, or the guy who wants to start the fire.

But I am more comfortable being still now. I have more room to notice what is happening while it’s happening. For me, that is growth. It isn’t becoming someone different. It is expanding the ways I am capable of showing up.

Thanksgiving 2025

After all these years, some of Belinda’s stillness has rubbed off on me, just as some of my mischief has rubbed off on Dalton. Belinda and I loved our children differently, and they carried pieces of both of us with them.

Of course, they absorbed things we probably wish they hadn’t. Some of my urgency, risk taking, and constant motion made their way into the environment just as surely as the laughter did.

I think most parents never really know what their children experienced growing up.

We know what we intended. We know what we tried to provide. We remember what happened from our side. But intention and experience are not the same thing.

There is probably a gap between the parents we intended to be, the parents we believed we were, and the parents each of our children actually experienced.

We intend to ask them more about that gap. Not to correct their memories or explain our side. Just to listen. Because that part of the story belongs to them, not us.