What does it mean to be a parent? Instead of just ‘somebody that has kids?’ We’ve talked about this many times here—it’s basically the premise of The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids—as a kind of choice. And it is that…people choose to build their life around this. They choose to be different from their own parents—to be an ancestor instead of a ghost. They choose to work on themselves, to work hard at this. They decide that it’s not too late to change.

Being a great parent isn’t something you’re born with. It’s not something that you’re just naturally good at. It’s a choice. And yet, it’s worth pointing out that this isn’t something we’re totally in control of.

There is a beautiful passage in The Velveteen Rabbit where the young rabbit asks one of the seasoned old toys in the playroom whether ‘becoming real’—the process of being changed by the love of a child—is something that has to do with how a toy is made. Is it about having certain parts, he asked? Does it require a certain makeup?

“Real isn’t how you are made,” says the toy horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

So yes, it’s a choice, but an unusual type of choice. It’s the decision, as we’ve talked about, to accept this process. To open yourself up to it. To let it change you.

We choose to have kids, and they choose to give us their love, to really love us. We play with them, we connect with them, we open ourselves to them and they to us. And then this process changes, transforms both of us in the most wonderful and magical of ways.