A tale of a proud father - how my baby daughter made my life richer

Exactly one year ago the woman of my life - my wife - gave birth to the second woman of my life - my daughter - and my life as I knew it has come to an end. Today, my daughter celebrates her first birthday and I can’t seem to comprehend how the time has passed so quickly… and there is no day I’m thankful enough for this little, sweet baby girl. I never knew this kind of love ever existed…

So they say kids are great…

Before I became a father, a few friends of mine said to me kids were great… and I thought - “of course you say kids are great - what else can you say now that you have kids, right?” Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to have kids, but it was an abstract feeling for me, I didn’t know what it meant to have a kid.

Now I know. “Kids are great” is an understatement.

Kids are amazing. You discover a totally different art/type of love than the one to your spouse or to your parents. Something changes in you. It’s such a positive change that I wouldn’t ever want to miss that. This new art of unconditional love and devotion is just mind-blowing, it’s incredible.

If you don’t have kids you don’t know what I’m talking about.

Whenever I heard above statement before I thought “yeah, right” but now I know it’s totally true. I’ve used words like amazing, incredible before… but the truth is that until you get a baby child on your own, you really have no clue what I’m talking about. Sorry, but I really know, just a year and one day earlier I didn’t have a clue.

Some of my friends in their 30s don’t seem to want a child.

I don’t blame them. They say they are busy with their careers, the timing’s not right, whatever… and the fact of the matter is that they’d probably be just fine and live quite a happy life… and a “kids are great” statement won’t convince them. The problem is that, as stated before, “if you don’t have kids, you don’t know what I’m talking about” - so they don’t know what they are missing out on.

Now that I know what it means to be a father, I know that I wouldn’t want to miss it for anything. I know what it feels and that this kind of feeling can’t be described in words. You just have to have your own kid, see it grow rapidly, be dependable only on yourself, be smiling to you in the middle of the night… to discover this new world of feelings, emotions and love. And it’s not something you want to miss. Not in million years. Trust me, I know.