What fatherhood taught me to see

My way of seeing women changed in stages, over the course of my life — and perceiving better was, for me, a learning as concrete as any other.

As a child, woman was my mother. Younger, girls were just "the ones who didn't play what I played." In adolescence, I started seeing them differently. At 16 I found in Shana a life partner. Then I saw woman as a mother, holding the family together from the inside, in work that almost never shows. And then my daughter was born, after the boys — and that's when my perception took its biggest leap.

Watching a girl grow up at home, alongside her brothers, lays bare two things at once. The first is the size of her potential — no smaller than the boys', just sometimes expressed in another way. The second is that the world still doesn't offer her the same room it offers them — and that part of my role as a father is to not normalize that.

I even changed my mind about what I mean when I talk about men and women "completing" each other. To complete isn't to divide into boxes — you handle this, I handle that. It's to add potentials without anyone having to shrink their own. What I want for my daughter is exactly what I want for my sons: full room to realize what she's capable of being.

At bottom, it's my usual theme: we only come to truly respect what we learn to perceive well. With women, I took a while — but life together, and above all fatherhood, taught me to look better.