A New Take on Parenting and Life - Learning from 2024

A proper aim for raising a child and being there for them when it matters

2024 - Alyssa and I marked the turning of this New Year on the couch of her parent’s house in Iowa days after the loss of Lucy. We intentionally stayed up to watch the moment we changed over from 2023. We both recognized it was just a human created concept, but on this day, the change from 2023 to 2024 felt like it meant something.

We embarked on this year in search of our “new normal”. 2024 would be a year focused on healing and integration for us as we traversed each change of season. We didn’t really know what that meant or what it would entail, but we realized that if we didn’t approach this period of our life with purpose that it had the potential of throwing our lives back into chaos. So we went slow, we listened to others who had traveled before us and we challenged ourselves to figure out what it meant to live a life following the loss of a child.

While there were many aspects of this year and our healing journey that surprised us, one learning had a particularly profound effect on me. It was a complete reshaping of how I view my role as a parent in life. The transition to parenthood is such a critical rite of passage, yet one in which we seem to have lost touch with the importance of, at least in our culture. Showers are thrown, gifts are sent, but even after the nursery is set up and a baby is soundly sleeping in the next room, one can lose track of the wild evolution and reshaping of purpose that your life just took on.

There have been many themes that reoccurred throughout 2024. One that kept cropping up throughout the past 12 months was that of the loss of innocence. I first came to this realization on June 16th, as Alyssa and I re-read our wedding vows to each other in Bozeman, Montana overlooking the Bridger mountain range.

I read three words aloud of the vows that I had written for Alyssa six years prior and tears came to my eyes. I reflected back on the scene where I was sitting down to put pen to paper to create these vows in a cabin in the Northwoods of Wisconsin. I was slap happy with excitement the day before my wedding. I felt the odd desire to stand over this past version of myself and to place my hand on their shoulder as I sat writing and say, “If you only knew how you’ll be challenged.”

I pressed on reading the vows, but had to stop as that thought fast forwarded from six years ago to just one year prior. I stopped reading, the emotion was so overwhelming. As I reflected on where we were one year prior, I was struck with a realization that we were living life in a state in which we would never return. June 16th of 2023 - I had just left rehab, I was reunited with my family and adamant that life was going to be different. Alyssa was nearly two months pregnant and we were still about a month and a half away from finding out about Lucy’s health condition.

Life seemed so perfect.

As I stood on the deck holding Alyssa in my arms, there was only one statement that I could get out of myself in that moment.

“We were so innocent.”

I realized in that moment that we would never live in that state that existed for us from June 12th, when I left rehab, through August 8th, when we found out about Lucy’s health condition, of 2023. No matter how our lives progress, we are forever understanding of how unbelievably fragile life is by bearing the difficulties of watching a child pass before you. We are forever changed.

Shortly after that anniversary trip, Grant was talking with someone about his sister Lucy and how she had passed away. Grant has cycled this year between emotional when making these types of statements to being extremely factual about it. On this particular occasion he was being incredibly factual in his ramblings about death.

“Don’t you wish you could just keep them innocent?”

This rhetorical question that someone posed caught me off guard. I thought deeply on it for a long while and the outcome of that thinking is that it has surprisingly reshaped my entire approach to parenting.

I realized something about those innocent periods of our lives that my family lost this year. Everyone is going to lose that innocence at some point in their lives. I have had many experiences like it in the past, just none that were so obvious to me as in this past year. Suddenly, I found a reframing to my role as parent that has set my course in how I engage with Grant.

I am here to guide my children through periods of their lives where they will lose their innocence.

I look at 2024 with my own parents and in-laws as an example. This is not a road that they have traveled before themselves. Despite that, they have been there for us to allow us to traverse the journey of finding our “new normal” and have traveled alongside us as well. They facilitated and allowed us to progress through this intense period of time where Alyssa and I lost innocence this year, and they allowed us to become strengthened through that journey.

I reflect back on my own upbringing to key moments in my life, and I think this lesson was always there right in front of me. More than anything, my parents seemed to always be there to guide me through those moments in life where I felt lost, betrayed or hurt. Those times when life had shown itself for what it truly is and I lost a bit of that childhood innocence that we all come into this world with, but will eventually lose.

That’s what I want to replicate as a father. That’s one of Lucy’s incredible gifts and lessons to our family from this past year. Throughout our lives we will all continue to lose our innocence, to have the scales fall from our eyes so to say, and that loss can either be integrated into your life and lead to growth and the creation of someone stronger or it can lead to your utter destruction and potential nihilism.

As a parent and as an individual, my purpose is to aim for the former.

That’s all I’ve got.

Kyle