It seems so ordinary. It is hardly glamorous. It’s exhausting.

Driving around like an Uber driver. Picking up toys. Making lunches. Nagging about homework. Doing laundry. Wondering why your own clothes are always so filthy.

When you could be out succeeding! When just a few hours ago you were making some big deal at the office. When you used to be someone who went on adventures and had wild nights.

On some level, we can relate to Tennyson’s “Odysseus,” who after all those years on the high seas, for all his fame and cunning, found homelife back in Ithaca rather underwhelming and longed to leave again. But just because we can relate, doesn’t mean Odysseus was right. Did he not understand how his men—who all died on the journey home—would have killed to be in his position? Did he forget how he had felt the same restlessness even in Circe’s paradise? And in fact, that what he had longed for there was this homelife he now wanted to leave?

In the poem, Odysseus can see that his son is more properly centered—that he doesn’t resent his “common duties, common duties, decent not to fail / In offices of tenderness, and pay.” Perhaps what Odysseus cannot see, and what we often miss, is that there is nothing common about this at all.

We are so lucky. Not everyone gets this. Not everyone does it either—plenty of parents are neglectful or self-absorbed or incompetent. Besides, we will someday miss the drives to school. The sounds which drive us crazy now will later fill us with nostalgia. We will be begging our kids to come over and bring their grandchildren. Or begging them to let us come over and take care of them—to be able to do things for them.

But we have that right now. It might not be glamorous, it might be common but not nothing. It’s extraordinary. It’s better than anything.