I am their foundation.

I see and understand it more clearly each year.

That smirk Sidney makes when she throws a biting comment my way, that’s my smirk, my biting comment.

Ellie’s pants this morning, her hysterics over the way they felt touching her belly. Her insistence that “nothing in my closet fits”. That right there was a thirty-eight year old women in a five-year old’s body.

And Audrey when she nods her head in agreement to something you know she doesn’t feel in her core is right, I see myself, a million times over saying yes when really I mean no. Trying hard not to rock the boat.

We go to church,

have amazing friends and family.

and are surrounded by love and opportunity.

But, that means nothing without something to emulate. A living, breathing, model, that twenty-four hours a day shows them how to rise and fall.

It is me.

The responsibility sits on my shoulders.

And in that responsibility, is quite possibly, one of the most profound privilege’s of parenthood.

The window into your own behavior and the chance to course correct.

The chance for each of us to do better.