Welcome to the Daily Dad podcast where we provide one lesson every day to help you

with your most important job being a dad. These are lessons inspired by ancient philosophy,

by practical wisdom, and insights from dads all over the world.

Thank you for listening, and we hope this helps.

Transcend this bitter math.

We know our parents sacrificed for us. That's what history is. People giving up stuff

for future generations, whether it's crossing lonely oceans or fighting in wars, or as it was in the

old days, enduring painful suffocating relationships and stultifying gender rules. The writer Susan Strait writes in her book

in the company of women that she was once told by her mother, when you get married, you give

away 50% of your life. Back then, this was truer than it needed to be, in some cases even an

underestimation. What about the other half? A young Susan asked, hopefully,

when you have a baby, you give the other half away. Her mother replied, matter-of-factly,

yikes. Look, we should count ourselves lucky that society has progressed at least a little bit.

We should acknowledge that our parents and their parents had to compromise

and go without things that we take for granted today. We should also be empowered and confident

enough to say, not me. Yes, marriage and relationships are hard. Yes, our kids have forced us to make

changes. There are things we can't or won't do anymore, but does that mean we have to

lose ourselves, lose our freedom? Absolutely not. We can transcend the bitter math by looking for

double opportunities, as we've talked about, by working on ourselves and our relationships,

by asking for help, by refusing to give up on dreams, even as we get older,

by understanding that to quit on ourselves is to quit on our kids, it's teaching them a terrible

lesson. We're not giving away anything. We're adding things. And by including our kids,

...