My son had a heart-achingly pathetic look on his face. Maybe I was just imagining it, but I felt I could see an entire train of thoughts in that look. He had been born less than a week before and had somber eyes on top of cheeks that looked like they could be measured in square feet. As I tried to burp him, he stared forward with a look of resigned confusion and discomfort. If anything in his life was truly painful, he had ways of letting us know, sucking air into his tiny lungs and screaming it out in a frantic squeak. But the process of being burped did not typically rise to this level of distress. I held the kid in a sitting position on my lap  and used one hand to hold his face (my fingers getting lost in the folds of his cheeks and neck) while gently hitting his back. His reaction was that pathetic look. He seemed to be wondering what had gone wrong in his short life to lead to this moment. Why was this man holding his face and hitting him? Not being able to fight back or, indeed, even hold his own head upright, there was nothing to do but sit there and let whatever was happening happen. And I wished I could reassure him.

I was fairly new at parenting. I now had two boys: a two-year old and the aforementioned newborn. But I could already tell that the desire to reassure them that whatever was happening was ok was going to be relatively constant for a long time. The two-year-old at least had some understanding of doing something difficult in order to get to something good. He may not have liked having to wait for Mom or Dad to put his shoes on him, but it paid off when we went outside and he didn’t have to worry about stepping on a sharp rock or searing his feet on a driveway heated to a dull, glowing red by the Texas sun.

But for a newborn, reassurance was more difficult. He couldn’t put the pieces together as well, and there were a lot of unpleasant pieces to account for. One of the first things to happen to most children is a barrage of vaccines. In the hospital, I had watched as the nurse plunged needles of disturbing length (especially in relation to the size of the target) into my child an hour or so after he had exited the womb. And I hoped that he could forgive me for letting it happen. A few days later, I braced myself for the screams that I knew would come as another nurse prepared to stab my sleeping son’s foot in order to draw blood for a test. He woke up in an understandably bad mood, the screams shortening my life expectancy. On any given day of parenting, there may be dozens of moments like this, moments where you have to inflict discomfort or frustration on a child who has no comprehension of why you are doing it. And you have to move past the look in your child’s eyes and the tug on your heart that make you feel like you have betrayed them because, ultimately, it is for their good.

I don’t see my children’s happiness as my goal as a parent. Rather, my hope is that my children will make the world a better place. As a Christian, I believe that Jesus is the one and only Doorway to heaven. But I hope that my children will function sort of as windows to heaven, giving people a glimpse of the party going on inside so that they find themselves wanting to get in and looking for the Doorway. Of course, I also want them to speak up and point to the Doorway, something that windows are not typically known to do unless they have a sign saying something along the lines of “main entrance on south side of building.” So the analogy sort of breaks down, but I thought that the phrase “windows to heaven” sounded pithy, so you’re just stuck with it, alright?

Seriously, though, my ultimate goal as a parent is to point my children to God and, as much as possible, get them walking in His direction. And only an idiot would argue that doing the right thing and being, to the best of their ability, “good people” will always make them happy. Thus, my goal is not to make them happy. In fact, sometimes it has to be just the opposite. Occasionally, they have to be stabbed with vaccinations to prevent them from contracting a disease. Or they have to be sent to their rooms so that they learn how not to be menaces to society by graduating from throwing toys at their parents to throwing staplers at coworkers or bricks at police officers. But it’s tough to be tough on your kids when you also want them to like you.

A newborn, so I’ve heard, can only see about six to eight inches away. Sure, this changes rapidly, but it takes time for them to be able to see what is happening across the room. For the first several weeks, I suspect my kids lived in a world of shifting lights and colorful blobs. Every once in a while, one of those blobs would coalesce into a face, a big grin underneath tired eyes, as I leaned in to try to coax a smile from them. I hate it when I have to be the bad guy, the one who allowed the pain of the vaccination or who inflicted the strange and exhausting experience of a bath. I want to build as many positive associations as possible. I want my kids to smile when my face emerges from the background. I want to be one of the good blobs. But parenting is more difficult than that. It’s not about making happy children; it’s about raising good humans. Done right, there are moments of pain, frustration, screaming, and a child’s firm conviction that you are a closet fascist. But there are also moments of happiness and laughter and messes that were fun to make and that can be cleaned up later, moments when parents get to be the friendly blobs.