My mom got sick when I was nine. Breast cancer. The details are a bit blurry now, but I think the survival rate back then for her type of cancer was around 30%. Today, it’s something like 95%.
She fought it for five years — with a few somewhat good years of remission tainted by lingering complexities from the first round of treatments.
She passed away 10 days before my 15th birthday.
I only have a handful of vivid memories from that time; they mostly come in flashes. What I do remember, however, is that despite my mom’s suffering and my dad’s unimaginable grief, he somehow kept everything together for us.
Somehow.
I honestly don’t know how you care for five kids, a sick spouse, keep the house running, work your job, teach piano lessons in the early morning and late night, and still find the energy to play catch in the yard. But he did.
Words will never, ever be enough to express the gratitude I feel so many years later for the monumental sacrifice he made just so we could feel normal.
It was never easy or perfect, but it was steady. For kids, at that age, steady is nothing short of sacred.
It was, of course, so many years later before I realized — or could even comprehend — what it cost him. And I’ll say it again. The inhuman effort it must have required to make our childhood feel, well, like childhood. He carried the load so quietly that I barely noticed, let alone appreciated, how hard it was — until I had kids of my own.
When I think about what it means to build a life that feels good, my mind doesn’t go to career goals or net worth. It goes to him. To the late-night grocery runs. The piano bench. Tossing the baseball along the side of the house. The choice to show up, over and over, when nobody was applauding.
My sweet wife and I have worked hard to make our home feel like that — steady, good, honest, safe. She had her own cancer scare a few years ago. It was early stage, caught as early as it could have been, but that moment was still like hitting a gong, reminding us how fragile all of this really is. For a time, we held on tighter to each other, slowed down, and focused hard on what really mattered.
When she was pregnant with our youngest, I had my own season of being stretched way too thin. I was working full-time, leading our church congregation, keeping the house running, and taking care of the kids while she rested through most of her pregnancy. I didn’t always handle it gracefully, and if I’m being perfectly honest, I can’t remember ever having the thought: this is the work that matters.
It was an absolute grind. It exacted more effort than I thought was possible. I got by for months on two or three hours of sleep a night.
What I often did, though, was remind myself that at least my wife wasn’t in the other room dying while I worked myself to exhaustion to care for our family.
I think I’ve always had a good home life. It’s never been perfect — often far from a Hallmark card kind of life — but it’s never been broken. We’ve laughed a lot. We eat together (sometimes). We sit together and talk. We rarely fight — and it’s almost always about stupid things — and then we apologize. We’re imperfect parents but we’re imperfect with intention.
We’ve built something solid for ourselves and our kids.
It begs a question that’s caused me to stop and think so many times in the last few years: Why have I spent so much of my energy giving the best of myself to jobs that didn’t ask for or even deserve it?
I’ve worked jobs that have drained the life out of me. Jobs where no one asked me to work myself to exhaustion, but I did it anyway. I was always driven by this odd mixture of ambition, guilt, and some misplaced sense of duty. I’ve slept on office floors. I’ve taken calls while I’m working in the field in freezing rain and snow. Or the burning sun. I wanted recognition which I didn’t get, and I did it because I felt obligated.
I believed we were building something that mattered. And I thought the only way to do that was to give everything I had, every time. Somewhere along the way, I confused worth with effort. I stopped asking if the thing I was pouring myself into was worth being drained for.
When I look back at the work that’s meant the most, it’s definitely not professional achievements. That feels good, of course, but what really matters is what I’ve helped build at home.
It’s packing lunches. Coaching basketball and soccer even though I’m not good at either. It’s holding my wife’s hand just because I enjoy being close to her. It’s tucking our kids in at night. Talking one of them through a panic attack in the middle of the night. Folding laundry while everyone sleeps.
These are the moments that won’t earn you a corporate job, probably. But they build something better than any job-for-pay ever will.
Yet I still catch myself often giving away the best of my attention, my creativity, and my time to people who will never know my kids’ names. It’s a near-constant fight for me to stop measuring my worth in output. I wrestle every day with the voice that says rest is laziness and presence is not productive.
But I’m learning.
I’m learning, slowly, that misplaced work is the heart of the problem.
Home has been and will always be where the work is worth it. Home is where I’ve been most needed, and it’s the one place where I’ve never had to earn my value. I just have to show up for it.
That’s the incredible thing about home: just showing up, most of the time, is enough.
I still struggle to give the best of me to the people who actually need me. I’m still working too many hours. Still building something. Still showing up in business and life. I’m not trying as hard to prove myself at work — at least not in the same exhausting ways.
The life that I want — that I’ve always wanted — is a life that feels like the one my dad gave me.
Quiet, steady, and full of unnoticed but remarkable effort that adds up to something.
And if you have to work for something — let it be that.
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