For your child, would you...

For your child, would you...

• Face a bear?
• Fight a shark?
• Throw yourself before a bus?
• Get out of your chair and play Candy Land?

I've known since she was born that I'd block bullets to save my daughter, and I thought that meant something. Over time, I've come to realize that romantic and glorious self-sacrifice is easy compared to the daily tension between time spent on myself and time spent on my daughter.

She's more and more vocal and direct about what she wants. She says plainly, "Come here. Sit down. Stay with me." There's only so much time for that, unfortunately, and I mean that two ways. Short term, there are finite hours in the day. Long term, she will eventually see me as the Old Man, ruining her life, or at the very least embarassingly square. She won't want me around.

By the way, I borrowed the above questions from a TV commercial. Kids in it asked the camera, "would you fight a bear?" and so on. The last kid asks, "would you drive a minivan?" The commercial goes on to talk about the tremendous proven safety of the minivan it's selling.