The Burden of Being Needed

The other night, I came home after working twelve hours. It was nine o'clock, I hadn't eaten dinner, and I was exhausted. I heated up some food, stood at the counter, and hoped to have a few peaceful minutes to eat before transitioning into dad mode.

My daughters had other plans.

My oldest was excited to see me, as she usually is. My youngest, though, wanted nothing to do with the idea that I might be home without being immediately available to her. She wanted me to pick her up. She wanted me to walk around with her. She wanted to be involved in whatever I was doing. When she went into another room, she became upset and wanted me to comfort her. Not just anyone. Me.

And somewhere in the middle of trying to eat my dinner while responding to a seemingly endless series of requests, I found myself getting genuinely frustrated.

Holy f*ck, man. I just worked twelve hours. Can I not even have a few minutes to eat my f*cking dinner?

It wasn't my finest moment of internal dialogue, but it was an honest one. I was tired. I was hungry. I had spent most of the day attending to other people's needs, managing responsibilities, making decisions, and doing all the things that come with being an adult who has a demanding career and a family to support. I wanted to come home, eat something, and not be needed for a few minutes.

And there was my daughter, wanting nothing more than to be with her dad. Almost as soon as I recognized my frustration, another thought followed.

Shut up, Korey. Your daughter wants you. You should appreciate this.

And just like that, I wasn't only frustrated anymore. I felt guilty and ashamed for being frustrated.

I've been thinking about that moment because it captures something about parenting that I don't think we always give ourselves permission to acknowledge. There is an extraordinary privilege in being needed by your children. There is also a burden that comes with it. And sometimes, even when the privilege outweighs the burden a thousand times over, the burden is still there.

For a long time, I experienced a very different version of fatherhood. When our oldest daughter was born, she developed a strong preference for my wife. That wasn't particularly surprising. My wife spent more time with her, handled much of the day-to-day caregiving, and was the person she most naturally sought out for comfort. I was involved, of course, but when our daughter was upset, tired, or simply wanted someone, more often than not, she wanted her Mommy.

There were moments when that stung a little. I loved my daughter, and I wanted to be someone she reached for. But there was another side to that arrangement that I didn't always fully appreciate.

I had freedom.

Not the freedom of someone without children. My life had changed in all the ways a life changes when you become a parent. But I had a kind of freedom within our family that my wife often didn't. I could sit down without necessarily becoming the center of someone's attention. I could walk into another room without prompting an objection. If our daughter was upset, there was a good chance that my presence wasn't what she wanted anyway. Sometimes the most useful thing I could do was let my wife handle it.

At the time, I understood that my wife carried more of those immediate demands. I don't think I fully understood what that meant until I started experiencing more of them myself.

Then we had our second daughter. As she's gotten older, something has become abundantly clear: this little girl has a preference for her Dada.

My oldest still runs to the front door when I get home, excited to announce my arrival. My youngest might take a little longer to get there, but once she does, she has no particular interest in letting me go.

She wants me to hold her. She wants to walk toward me. She wants to be picked up and carried around. If I'm doing something, she wants to be part of it. If she gets upset, she wants me to make it better. Sometimes simply being in the same room isn't enough. She wants to be with me, in the most literal sense.

And I absolutely love it. There is something difficult to describe about becoming the person your child wants. Not because you have something to offer her or because you've done anything especially impressive, but because you are you. Your presence is what she's asking for. Your arms are where she wants to be. When the world becomes a little too much for her, you're the person she believes can make it better.

I've written before about how meaningful it has been to become more intentional with the time I spend with my daughters. I wrote about my youngest reaching for my finger as she learned to walk and how much it meant to discover that she was increasingly seeking me out. Those moments represented a relationship that was growing in ways I could actually see.

Well, that relationship has continued growing. She doesn't just reach for my finger anymore. She reaches for all of me, seemingly all the time.

And somewhere in that progression, I've discovered that the experience of being wanted looks a little different when it becomes the experience of being needed.

Wanting to be the person your child reaches for is one thing. Being that person when you're exhausted, hungry, distracted, overwhelmed, or simply trying to accomplish something is another. The emotional reward doesn't disappear. Neither does the demand.

What makes this particularly complicated is that I wouldn't trade it. If someone offered me the freedom I once had in exchange for being a little less important to my daughter in these moments, I wouldn't take it. Not even close. But that doesn't mean I never miss being able to sit down without someone needing me. And apparently, admitting that to myself is harder than I expected.

I think parents are especially susceptible to believing that gratitude should somehow cancel out difficulty. We know how fortunate we are to have our children. We know that childhood is fleeting and that the little person demanding to be held today will eventually become someone who doesn't need us in quite the same way. We may even know what it's like to wish our children wanted more of our attention.

Those realities matter. They can help us maintain perspective when the immediate demands of parenting threaten to consume our attention. But they can also become standards against which we judge every ordinary feeling we have.

When I find myself frustrated that my daughter won't let me eat dinner, I don't simply experience the frustration. I compare it against everything I know about how precious this time is. I think about how much I love her, how quickly she's growing, and how desperately I want to be part of her life. I remember that one day she won't reach for me like this. And then I start treating my frustration as though it's evidence that I've failed to appreciate what I have.

When did appreciating something come to mean that we're not allowed to find it difficult?

I can love my career and still be exhausted by it. I can appreciate the opportunities I've been given and still feel overwhelmed by the responsibilities that accompany them. I can value my marriage deeply and still occasionally want time alone.

None of those experiences strikes me as particularly contradictory. We generally understand that meaningful things can also be demanding, and that the demands don't necessarily diminish their value. But something changes when the responsibility is our children.

Perhaps it's because we understand how dependent they are on us. Perhaps it's because we recognize how profoundly our responses can shape their experiences of themselves and their relationships. Or perhaps it's because the love we feel for them is so powerful that anything resembling reluctance feels like a betrayal of it.

Whatever the reason, I sometimes find myself holding fatherhood to a standard I would never apply to another meaningful part of my life. I don't expect to love every minute of my work simply because I love what I do. Yet somehow, when my daughter wants me and I would rather have ten minutes to myself, I can feel as though the preference itself is something I should be ashamed of. And that shame changes the experience.

The original frustration is straightforward. I'm exhausted, I haven't eaten, and I want a few minutes to myself. But once I decide that I shouldn't feel that way, the problem becomes something larger. Now I'm not just tired. I'm disappointed in myself. I'm questioning whether I'm living up to the kind of father I want to be.

The standard becomes almost impossible to satisfy. If I respond to my daughter, I'm doing what I believe I should do, but I'm still frustrated. If I take a few minutes for myself, I may get what I need, but I feel guilty about it. Either way, I've found a reason to criticize myself. And none of that makes me more patient, more available, or better equipped to respond to her. It just makes me feel bad about having a need of my own.

There's a difference between holding ourselves accountable for how we respond to our children and condemning ourselves for the feelings that arise before we've even responded. I can recognize that my frustration is affecting my patience and decide I need to handle the moment differently. That's useful. But deciding that a loving father shouldn't experience the frustration in the first place doesn't give me anything constructive to work with. It asks me to be something other than human.

My youngest daughter is one. She doesn't understand what a twelve-hour workday means. She doesn't know how many decisions I've made, how many conversations I've had, or how long it's been since I last ate. Nor should she. She just knows that her Dada is home.

And when she wants me, the desire is immediate. She isn't weighing my needs against hers or considering whether I've had adequate time to decompress. She wants to be held, comforted, or included, and she's still developing the capacity to tolerate the frustration of not getting exactly what she wants when she wants it. That's a normal part of being a very young child. But my needs don't become illegitimate simply because hers are developmentally appropriate.

Her need for me doesn't make my need for myself disappear.

That seems obvious when I write it down. It feels considerably less obvious when I'm standing in my kitchen at nine o'clock, trying to eat dinner while listening to my daughter cry because someone other than me is holding her.

In those moments, it can feel as though there are only two choices. I can respond to her and set aside what I need, or I can attend to myself and feel as though I'm letting her down. But that framing is too simple.

Being responsive to our children doesn't require us to be endlessly available. Sometimes their needs call for us to set aside our own preferences. Sometimes they can tolerate a brief period of frustration while we finish something necessary. Sometimes another loving caregiver can step in, even when we're the person our child would prefer. And sometimes there isn't a response that leaves everyone completely satisfied.

I think that's an important part of parenting that gets lost when we talk about being present as though presence were an unlimited resource. It isn't.

Attention is finite. Energy is finite. Patience fluctuates. Our bodies need food, sleep, and rest. Our minds sometimes need a few minutes without another demand being placed on them. Those limitations don't disappear when we become parents, even if parenthood requires us to stretch them further than we once imagined.

There's another part of this experience that has changed the way I think about my wife.

For years, she was the person our oldest daughter wanted most. She was the one who could settle her when nobody else could, the one whose absence was noticed immediately, and the one who couldn't always hand off a responsibility simply because someone else was available.

I could recognize that intellectually. I could appreciate how much she did and try to support her.

But recognition and experience aren't quite the same thing. Now I have a daughter who sometimes makes it abundantly clear that another perfectly capable, loving parent simply isn't the one she wants. And I understand something about the weight of that preference that I didn't understand in quite the same way before.

There is a particular kind of responsibility that comes with knowing you can make something better simply by being there. It's difficult to walk away from a crying child when you know that picking her up would probably settle her almost immediately. It's difficult to ask someone else to take over when your child is making it unmistakably clear that she wants you. Even when you know another caregiver can meet her needs, you still feel the pull of being the person she prefers.

I imagine that my wife has experienced versions of that pull countless times. And I suspect that when I was enjoying some of the freedom that came with not being the preferred parent, she was occasionally wishing she could have a little of it herself.

It's strange how two people can live in the same home, raise the same children, love them just as deeply, and still experience the demands of parenthood so differently. One parent can wish to be needed more while the other occasionally wishes to be needed a little less. Neither feeling tells us very much about how deeply either parent loves the child.

I also find myself thinking about what happens as our children grow older. Right now, my youngest needs an enormous amount of help managing her feelings. She doesn't yet have the language, patience, or emotional regulation to understand why Dada might need to finish eating before picking her up. Her world is still organized around immediate experiences, and she relies on the adults around her to help make those experiences manageable. But that won't always be true.

As children develop, part of what they learn through relationships is that other people have needs, preferences, and limits of their own. They discover that loving someone doesn't mean having unrestricted access to that person's attention. They learn to wait, to tolerate disappointment, to consider another person's perspective, and eventually to recognize that relationships involve mutual accommodation.

Those lessons don't require parents to become cold, unavailable, or rigid. They are learned within relationships where children know they are loved and can trust that their needs matter, even when those needs cannot always be met immediately.

I don't want my daughters to grow up believing that the people who love them must abandon themselves to prove it. And I don't want to teach them that lesson by abandoning myself.

That doesn't mean my preferences should routinely take precedence over theirs. I'm the adult. I chose to become a father. My children depend on me in ways I don't depend on them, and that creates responsibilities I take seriously.

Sometimes being a good father will mean doing something I don't particularly feel like doing. Sometimes it will mean picking up my daughter when I'm exhausted, playing when I'd rather sit down, or giving her my attention when my mind is still occupied by the day.

I accept that. More than that, I want to be the kind of father who does those things willingly, because I understand what they mean to my children. But willingness isn't the same as endless capacity. And accepting responsibility isn't the same as forfeiting the right to have needs.

I think that's the distinction I've been struggling to make. When my daughter reaches for me, I want to respond with warmth rather than resentment. I want her to experience herself as someone whose presence brings me joy, not as another obligation waiting for me at the end of a long day.

I've written before about how important that is to me, and I believe it just as strongly now. But I'm beginning to recognize that being the father I want to be cannot depend on pretending that I'm never exhausted, frustrated, hungry, or in need of a moment to myself.

I don't have a particularly elegant solution to the dinner problem. Some nights, I'll probably eat later than I'd like. Some nights, I'll hold my daughter while my food gets cold. Some nights, my wife will step in, and my daughter will be unhappy about it for a few minutes. And some nights, I'll be frustrated, even though I know how fortunate I am to have a child who wants me so badly. I'm trying to become more comfortable with the fact that all of those experiences can belong to a loving family.

Because the truth is that I don't want less of this relationship. I don't want my daughter to stop reaching for me. I don't want her to become less excited when I come home or less comforted by being in my arms. I don't want to return to being the parent whose presence is welcome but whose absence is barely noticed. I want to be the person she looks for, the person who can make things better, the person she trusts enough to reach for when the world feels overwhelming.

I just don't always want to be needed at nine o'clock at night when I've worked twelve hours and haven't eaten dinner.

Someday, my youngest daughter will walk into another room without caring whether I follow. She'll have things to do, people to see, and a life that increasingly belongs to her. The constant requests to be picked up will end. There will be a last time she reaches for me in this particular way, and I probably won't recognize it when it happens. I know that. It's part of why I cherish these moments as much as I do.

But I don't think the fact that I'll someday miss them means I have to enjoy every second while they're happening.

Maybe that's what I'm finally beginning to understand about the burden of being needed. The burden isn't evidence that the privilege has somehow diminished. It's part of what makes the privilege a responsibility rather than simply a feeling.

My daughter wants me. She trusts me. She finds comfort in me. And sometimes, when I'm tired and hungry and have nothing left to give, that extraordinary gift feels a little heavy.

Being grateful for a responsibility doesn't make it weightless.

I wouldn't trade being her person for anything. But every now and then, I'd really like to eat my dinner while it's still hot..