Dads’ Dreams For Their Kids – That’s How This Man Sees It With Gary McCoy

I’m pretty sure most guys with kids spend a little time each week thinking about their goals and dreams for their kids.  Whether we’ve got an athletic son that we would love to see in the Major League or NFL or a daughter we can picture in her Miss America sash, we want them to do so much more than we thought we ever could. 

Course, we don’t always have the same dream for all our kids.  We dream different things for each individual child.  While we might dream for one to win the Nobel Peace Prize, we dream another does less than 5 to 10 in a minimum security prison.  We dream for one to be President and another to pass his G.E.D. before he’s 30.

And it makes you wonder what our Dads dreamed for us. I look at the guys I grew up with. One’s a dentist, another the president of a steel company, and another one has a huge cattle ranch in Texas. Then, there’s me. I just can’t imagine my Dad sitting at on our porch when I was 13 years old, day-dreaming about the day his son would be getting up at 4 o'clock every morning and heading to a radio station where for four hours he’d drink coffee, sling a stream of b.s. deep enough to drown in and have the audacity to call it a job.

I’ve been doing this nearly 30 years and he still believes that one day his son’s gonna grow up and get a real job. No, he’s not disappointed in me, but I think he still doesn’t understand why in the world someone would pay me to do this.

“Son, you’re just talking," he'll say. "I do that for free.”  And what about dads who would have never dreamed of the things their kids would accomplish? Think about Bill Gates' dad. He was probably always getting onto little Billy about “spending too much time playing with all those little toys.”  I can hear him now: “Young man, if you spent as much time studying your history lessons as you do playing with your little gadgets, you might be able to get a college scholarship.”  Yeah, that road had a few curves in it, didn’t it?

Then there’s Phil Robertson, the Duck Commander. He was actually a great quarterback at Louisiana Tech. Imagine his Dad saying, "You’re gonna quit football? To play around in a duck blind? Well, not while you’re living in my house!”

We just never know, do we? I think it’s okay to dream, but probably a lot more important to SUPPORT. 'Course, I could be wrong. Wouldn't be the first time. And that’s how this man sees it.