Andy Laats

I punted.

I don't know, Drew, what's yours?

And at a red light on El Camino Real, he said, I want to feel love my entire life.

We stared at each other in silence until the light turned green.

My job was to pick up my kid from school.

My role on Earth was to prove myself worthy for an invitation into that inner life, not the life I saw snowboarding or talking Pokémon and know that kid well enough to say the right enough thing.

You know, I wonder if I didn't do pickups all those times, if he wasn't convinced that I would be there, if I knew him and his needs, would he have asked me that?

Who would have he asked?

All these times my kids were in this space, like nervous system to nervous system, it was beyond language.

We laughed or we cried or we stared at each other in silence, not needing words to be together.

It was like fused in a neurological sense, experiencing, thinking, feeling.

One thing is two people.

Now, maybe some of you have experienced this.

I hadn't, and I was trying.

But I learned a bunch, and maybe there's some lessons there too, for others.

For current A through M parents, if you find yourself tempted to daydream past, or maybe outsource some seemingly mindless task with your kid, remember, the routine can be the ticket to the transcendent.

For CEOs and technologists or anybody that's going to ask me now, how can you support parenting?

I'll let you know.

It's not about an easier path for logistics or some quicker path through the emotional evolutions.

You want to solve a hard problem?