In between those two times I talked with Steven about being a dad and how, with his busy schedule, he manages to make the time to enjoy those Cinderella moments in the lives of his children.
Kim – The everyday miracles that you sing about in "Cinderella" are so easy to miss. They're only going to be little for a blink and there is never enough time in the day. You're like Superman ... on the road, writing, Shaohannah’s Hope, your family ... Where do you find the time? You should write a book on that ... on where you find the time.
Steven - I've got to read the book on that first to figure out how I do what I do. I keep looking for the book too. How to do what we're attempting to do. You see, it's what we're attempting to do. I heard one of those stop you in your tracks things ... a man speaking to a group of guys about his definition of success. "It's actually having the people closest to me respect me and love me the most." That kind of nailed me to the wall because I'm a guy that a lot of people can respect from a distance. It's a safe enough distance that you can pretty much project anything that you and your publicist, record label and management want to project for the most part as long as you don't do anything too totally crazy out in public. You can keep the image as whatever you want people to think. You can show up at enough good charity events to have an image. But to have the people closest to you, especially as a man and a dad, to have those people – like my sons – to watch me when I'm tired and frustrated and no one else is looking and I've given them the same lecture 14 times and it's time to blow off some steam – to have those people respect you as much and really even more – and to have them go “man, that guy just has it so together.” The people who know the truth ... that was one of those “OK I'm going to stick that on my refrigerator door, probably only to remind me what a miserable failure I am.” But I will keep aspiring to that and being inspired by it.
Now as I say that, I have a 4-year-old and a 5-year-old pushing with all of their body weight on the doors while I hold them shut with my foot, trying to find the privacy to do an interview. So you see, here is a good moment where it's not really working so well because they want to dance.
At that point, we took a short break so Steven could explain to Stevey Joy and Maria Sue what he was doing.
Steven - Excuse me young ladies. I'm trying to do an interview right now, talking about what a great and terrible father that I am and I need you guys to go and celebrate what a wonderful dad you have. Ya'll go have a party.
The sweet little voices drifted over the phone as they cheered their dad and it was obvious that they had him firmly in the "Great" category that day.
Kim - I'm lucky today. All of my kids are in school so I have a little quiet during the day.
Steven - We were there. We were home free. My wife and I were sitting there, talking about how in a few short years we'll have an empty nest and we'll grieve and be really sad for about 15 minutes and then we'll party for the rest of the time. That was before our daughter Emily started praying for us to adopt a little sister for her. Now we have 22—year-old Emily, 18 and 17-year-old Caleb and Will and then 8, 5 and 4 year old little girls from China, our adopted daughters. But that's really the beauty of this whole deal for me. God does, really does hear our prayers and really does answer them in strange ways. I think one of those strange ways for me, as many times as I've prayed, "God I really don't want to miss out or blow it and get to the end of the journey, and say I've done a lot of those things that people have written about or shown up on awards shows, but not have vested in the lives of the people closest to me and enjoyed the journey with them." It was kind of like us adopting these little girls, one of the billions of little small miracles wrapped up in the great big miracle of experiencing watching these little people grow and realizing their love, has been a chance to learn from our first time around where we did blow it and even enjoy the journey even more. I remember so well, with our first time around, with Emily and then Caleb and Will, it seemed like we were never going to have another good nights sleep. There will always be a screaming baby with a temperature or a stomach ache and then that time passes and you spent so much of that time not enjoying it because you felt this huge weight of depression. You know, “my life is over” (laughs) as I know it. When you realize that wasn't the case, it's gone. At least this time around we can go “this too shall pass.” That helps in a lot of ways.
Kim – I remember those days so well. I swore that we would never be out of diapers.
Steven - Oh yeah. In fact, our goal, with us having one still in pull-ups, is to get all our children out of any form of diapers before they have to start putting them on us. We have to get them out of pull-ups before they have to break out the Depends.
