My 6-year-old kid looks up to me. Or so I thought.
Recently, in the middle of another adventure together, he looked at me and said, “I want to be a champion!”
Gulp, how the hell do I show him this?
He gets these mid-week epiphanies. They can be inspired by seeing the medals on his 17-year-old big brothers’ walls. Or finding boxes of my old medals, or even catching glimpses of his auntie’s shiny medals lining her at-home gym.
Like Captain Underpants, I stood there, wind blowing at my unsculpted back. I thought “I can do this, I can somehow figure out how to help shape the hero in him.”
I’ve got the recipe—or so I thought.
I’ve got a bit of charisma, energy, willingness to fail, grit to succeed and I surround myself with rockstar humans. However, my last decade of marriage and only recently a year out has taught me that I’ve got to be carefully deliberate. Ugh, feels awkward and compromising. There’s got to be a formula for showing my kid success on the battlefield regardless of the hamster ball I seem to be spinning on.
Let me back up a bit. Hudson, my extraordinary kiddo is a legendary boy. He’s got a curiosity fused with kindness, goofiness laced with imagination, and a “what can we do today Dad that’s going to be fun” mentality. He’s not the kid that bounces off walls but takes more of a pensive approach to things. So naturally I can’t take a back seat to the “champion” mentality I want to instill in him. Time for me to dust off my lagging health goals and show him how his dad does it.
The Coles Notes version of my life helped provide some answers as to what this path might look like for him. My mom’s always been my hero. I’m not really sure when it happened, but at some point in my 20s I saw her as a beacon of integrity and selflessness. She’s always been that voice of reason and moral standard in my life. Then there’s my dad, the guy I look up to as far as work ethic and goal setting goes. It wasn’t anything they did that made me realize I’d struck gold with incredible parents. It was the culmination of their character jackhammered into me from the day I was born.
I think at some point, they also tossed me into every sport imaginable and told me to do my best. So I did. And on the field was where I learned what it was like to be a champion. This was where my attitude on life began.
Training sucked. Or at least starting to train felt like a sucker punch. I worked out my legs and somehow my shoulders were sore for days. I wouldn’t say my form was unorthodox, but the areas my body pinched and creaked told me otherwise.
Trimming the “bad habits” fat was a necessary evil. If I was going to emulate what it looks and feels like to be a champion in life for Hudson, I was going to have to eliminate things. Let’s start with wings, fermented barley, and what felt like a need to attend social hour every day! At a minimum let’s set up a path to cut these down a bit, or a lot.
The more I regained my mental and emotional turf, the more I put him as a reason, and the more it mattered to me. The more it mattered to me, the less and less he became the focal point, and I started taking action for myself.
Setbacks were everywhere. Disappointments, not being where I wanted to be, any excuse I could find to sabotage my growth all seemed like Goliath-like realities. I was in status quo mode, and didn’t let myself push many boundaries, whether physical, spiritual, emotional, or mental. So I opted for help from everyone around me. I leaned heavily on phenomenal friends who helped carry me when I couldn’t carry myself.
It took time to regain my confidence in me, and while every day hasn’t become a win, my son sees my victories as his. And so we share these small wins with each other.
I’ve got a race coming up and nothing means more to me than showing my kids I can push myself. It’s not necessarily the medal for me, but because of my son’s affinity for pirate treasure, his eyes will light up when he sees that his dad has got something shiny and gold!
It’s a symbiotic relationship. I win, and so does my son. We do this as a team. We weren’t always a team. When once he’d run around me at all cost trying to get to his mom, he’s now starting to see me as a hero in his life and runs to me with reckless abandon every day after school. He’s been gut-punched a year and a half ago through my separation, though I’m helping him learn and heal, while I’m also the one that’s learning to listen to his heart and feelings, inevitably helping show him how to regulate his own big emotions.
“You’re my hero, Dad” has always been the pinnacle of fatherhood gifts, though in this process of showing him how, I’m finding that he’s in fact becoming mine.
