What is being a father but worry? We talked about that great image from Obama a while back. Being a parent, he said, is a little like taking your heart outside your body and putting it in a vulnerable person who makes bad decisions. 

And that was said by a guy whose children are guarded 24/7 by the Secret Service!

The point is: You’ll always worry. That’s what you’ve signed up for. Margaret Thatcher, another head of state, once speculated whether we worry more when our children are within reach or far away. We worry differently, but worry all the same. 

Because we love them. Because we know how important this job is. 

The important thing is that we don’t let this worry cripple us… or them. We have to keep it on a leash. We have to check it against our logic and our reason. We have to look at how this worry is affecting them and their ability to learn, experience and fail. 

Seneca reminds us often we suffer more in our imaginations than in reality. Let’s make sure we don’t subject our kids to that as well. And at the same time, let’s make sure we’re not whipping ourselves for perfectly understandable anxieties. 

This is what we signed up for. We’re just going to have to figure out how to deal with it.