Six Months In.

I am six months into the job I hope to hold until my very last breath: being a father.

In these first six months, I’ve felt a depth of love I never knew existed. As the days turned to weeks and then to months, that love hasn’t abated. It hasn’t plateaued. It has only grown—like an acorn into an oak tree.

For much of my adolescence, and all of my adulthood, I was entirely focused on my work. Back then, that was politics. I literally lived and breathed it, every minute of every day. I lived and planned my life in election cycles.

That drive gave me so much—loss, joy, ambition, the chance to walk the floor of Parliament. It shaped me. I don’t regret it. But now, it all feels smaller.

And I think about that often.

That something I was so determined to do, for so long—my literal childhood dream—something that governed every thought, every word, every article I read, every decision about where I lived… that all of it could be so easily displaced by the beating heart of my son.

More than displaced — made irrelevant. Made temporary. Made small.

All by this vast, all-consuming love I feel for Theodore.

Isn’t that the remarkable thing? Isn’t that the blessing - the gift from God?

It’s literal life. The most precious, beautiful, enveloping, terrifying thing that comes to us.

These are the most remarkable memories. The most wonderful job I’ll ever have—being a father. Memories he won’t remember, at least not yet. But I will hold them in my mind for the rest of my life: How he smiles when he wakes up from a nap. How I smile. His beautiful blue eyes. How he sleeps. How he eats.

I’ve started noticing things I never would have slowed down for before. On a run today, I stopped—completely still—just to watch a lone swan chick paddling near the riverbank. I think it was a mute swan (they're often alone from a young age).

I’m not sure why it struck me the way it did, but I stood there for a while, watching it drift—thinking about how small and fragile life can be, and how fiercely we love it anyway.

Aside from how deeply in love I feel with Theodore, what surprises me most is how completely these six months have cast a shadow over the thing I was once most focused on.

Not because politics doesn’t matter. But because this - this ordinary, sacred, daily life - matters more.

And I suppose that’s what growing older, and maybe growing up, really is.

Letting your childhood dreams step aside to make space for something even more meaningful.

How glorious it is, how lucky we are.