Dadvice Weekly #48 / The Comfort Trap
Dadvice Weekly - #48
I am, by default, a comfort-seeking person.
I like routines, and I like knowing what’s coming. I like the feeling at the end of a hard week when the house is quiet and I can sit down without anything being asked of me. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if I’m being honest, comfort had become something I was quietly organizing my life around—keeping things at a temperature I could easily manage, keeping the unexpected at arm’s length.
Then we became foster parents.
We chose to become foster parents, but nothing prepares you for what that actually means. Within the span of about fourteen months, we went from two kids to four: a 9-month-old boy, and a 9-year-old girl, half-siblings. They arrived on different timelines, with different needs, and with histories that were not ours to rewrite. The chaos was real. It was a 2 a.m. feeding on a Tuesday after a hard conversation with a caseworker, while my four-year-old was sick and my wife and I were running on fumes. It was being in the hospital for almost a month with the baby as we learned he was medically fragile and needed medical intervention. Comfortable life wasn’t an option. There was no version of the situation where I could engineer my way back to baseline.
That’s when I started thinking about the difference between just surviving something and actually growing from it.
As fathers, resilience is what most of us are striving toward. You take the hit, whatever your stressor or offense may be. You absorb it, and then you return to who you were before. But there’s another option, one where the stress doesn’t just get absorbed, it builds something. Where you come out of the hard thing stronger than you went in. Similar to how the immune system works: a little exposure doesn’t weaken you, it trains you. The same logic applies to the hard seasons of life, even when you didn’t sign up for them.
As I mentioned before, we didn’t know what we were getting into, at least to what extent, before we dove into it. But that’s actually a good thing for me because if I did know, I probably wouldn’t have signed up. And some of what it’s building in me, I couldn’t have built on purpose. There is a kind of callus you only develop through repeated friction.
I am more patient than I was. Not because I practiced patience in the abstract, but because I had no other option—and over time, the forced repetition of it became something more like a reflex. I’m more compassionate and willing to understand where people are coming from without judgement. My threshold for what counts as a crisis has shifted. Things that would have derailed us two years ago now just get folded into the day.
What separates dads who grow from the hard seasons from the dads who just endure them? I don’t think it’s capacity, and I don’t think it’s temperament either. I think it’s mostly a question of awareness. Are you present and aware in the midst of trial?
Enduring it looks like this:
You get through the hard stretch, you exhale, and you immediately start looking for ways to make sure it doesn’t happen again. You optimize for fewer hard seasons in the future. The experience becomes something to recover from.
Growing looks like this:
At some point in the middle of the chaos, or maybe just after it, you ask what it’s doing to you. What did that require of me that I didn’t have before? What did I figure out under pressure that I wouldn’t have figured out otherwise? Ask the questions plainly, without pretense, and see what comes up. Most dads coming out of a hard stretch feel like they lost ground. The answers to those questions are evidence that the opposite is true: the season was building you the whole time, even when it felt like it was only costing you.
If you’re in a hard season right now—and a lot of dads are, whether that’s visible chaos or the quieter kind—I’m not going to tell you to reframe it or lean in or find the gift inside the struggle because that’s not how this works. But at some point it’s worth asking what it’s building. In my experience, the answer is a better version of yourself you couldn’t have constructed on purpose. -KC
Dadvice Weekly is Kyle and Skyler—two friends in their thirties, living in Colorado, settling into fatherhood and trying to stay sane. Every Tuesday we share what’s working in our homes: gear we use, routines we’ve tested, ideas we’re trying. It could be a recipe, a product that solved a problem, or just what we’re thinking about as dads.
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