The Happiest Life by Hugh Hewitt

Author:Hugh Hewitt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2013-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

The seven gifts have specific applications in the context of raising children, but I must underscore the importance of actually showing up to give them. Nothing else compares with quantity when it comes to time spent with children. It is a cliché made of granite-weight truth and diamond hardness. Every minute you are in the house; every minute at their games, plays, concerts; every minute you are at a teacher’s conference or sitting next to them laboring over any project is a minute invested. With children, giving the seven gifts starts with giving time.

I could go on and on and on with assertions about the joys and sorrows of parenting, but I don’t want to dilute this key core message. The best gift is time with you. Forgo the income, skip the promotion, pass on the party at every possible turn, and be there when they want you to be, even when they don’t ask you to.

David Mamet told me that writing a play was like raising a child: the years fly by but the afternoons are endless. Same with every birthday party—seemingly endless. Except now they are long gone and we sit and laugh about them, about bad concerts and awful softball games, interminable swim meets and terrible talent shows, a variety of back-to-school nights, and, of course, slammed doors and arguments about cars and curfews. (“Why can’t I drive to Anaheim on New Year’s Eve?”) There are experts on all these subjects, and Betsy and I are pretty accomplished on some of them, but my take is very, very simple: The biggest gift you can give is yourself. Be profligate.

Here’s an astonishing thing about children: they bridge many gulfs if only for a time. In a green room in the Newseum for a broadcast of This Week with George Stephanopoulos, the famously ferocious Rahm Emanuel is attending to his twelve-year-old daughter like any other dad in any other room crowded with strangers. None of the flood of famous expletives, just a doting dad.

In the same green room, Arianna Huffington. Now, I have shared dozens of green rooms with Arianna, and have interviewed her scores of times going all the way back to her former husband Michael’s unsuccessful Senate run in 1992. A favorite throwaway line of mine when Arianna’s name comes up is that I knew Arianna four Ariannas ago. We’re like kids in school whose surnames are spelled alike and always get stuck in the same lines together. Arianna and I have passed through two decades of punditry constantly crossing each other’s paths. And on every occasion I recall she has daughters, and she recalls I have both sons and a daughter, and we chat about our children’s lives. With apparent genuine interest.

Another example. Sean Hannity is a wonderful host to his television guests, charming, welcoming, ready with a laugh. Some in the world of broadcast are remote from their guests, but not Sean, and especially not if you bring along a child, as I did on a couple of occasions.

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