You can imagine it. You can see it happen to other people. You can read about it, hear about it, see it captured in great works of art.
But until you experience it yourself, you can’t truly understand it. We’ve been talking recently about Lin-Manuel Miranda’s song from Hamilton, “Dear Theodosia.” “There is so much more inside me now,” Hamilton sings. It captures perfectly what it means to be a parent: “Pride is not the word I’m looking for / Oh Philip, you outshine the morning sun / My son.”
And that’s the thing—until it happens to you, you don’t really know. You don’t know how it completely rewires you, how it rearranges your priorities, how it fills a space inside you that you didn’t even know was empty. We quoted before this piece of parenting wisdom that Warren Beatty once shared with Jerry Seinfeld: “One of the nice things God does,” Beatty said, “is that he doesn’t let people who don’t have kids know what they’re missing.”
It’s worth noting that Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote that song after becoming a father himself. How could he not? How could he resist putting into words and music the overwhelming beauty of it all—the way having a child suddenly cracks you open and fills you with emotions you never knew existed? Because once you’ve felt it—once you’ve been cracked open and filled with that overwhelming love—you want to share that feeling with others, even knowing they won’t truly understand until they experience it themselves. After all, that’s what Warren Beatty meant—it’s a gift waiting to be discovered, a joy that can only be known firsthand.
