By Leo Babauta
I’ve been a father for more than 21 years, and have 6 kids altogether, and have loved every messy minute of it.
And now I have a young brother who’s becoming a father this month, and is deeply scared by the prospect of fatherhood. He’s not sure if he’ll do a good job, worried he’ll fail.

I can tell him this: being a father is the scariest thing I’ve known in my life. All of a sudden, I was 19 and in charge of a fragile human life, so precious and dear but so flickering and easily put out. And I was completely unprepared — no class in school taught me what to do, and I had very few life lessons by that time.
It was the most terrifying experience ever. And it’s been the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done.
More rewarding than getting married, than running an ultramarathon, than starting a successful business, than helping thousands of people change their lives through my example.
But to be honest, I sucked at it at first.
My biggest problem, apart from a dreadful lack of knowing what the hell I was doing, was a sense of entitlement. My child should do what I say, behave a certain way, grow into the person I want her to be. That’s ridiculous, I now know, but it caused me all kinds of conflict in the beginning.
I now see a father not as a shaper of clay, but a herder of cats. A father isn’t molding a child into the perfect ideal of a human being he’d like her to be … he’s trying to keep her alive, and feel loved, as she grows into whatever she already is.
So for young men who are becoming fathers, and young women becoming mothers as well (because there’s not much difference other than anatomy) … here are my thoughts on herding cats. Just know that I’ve violated all of these ideas repeatedly, and learned these lessons the hard way. Read more @http://blackasset..com/2015/08/the-essence-of-fatherhood-6-simple.html

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