“Dad, I Love You More Than Anyone in the World”... The Day That Common Lie Comes to an End [An Adult’s Answer Key]

[Financial News] Friday night, September 4. The minds of fathers in their 40s and 50s, completely drained after a week in the corporate battlefield, hold only one thought.
“This weekend, I’m absolutely going to lie on the sofa and do nothing.”
But the moment they open the front door and see their son running out to cling to their legs, his eyes sparkling with excitement, that modest plan collapses without a fight.
“Dad, you’re going to play soccer with me tomorrow, right?”
Dragging their heavy, exhausted bodies along, they offer a hollow promise: “Sure, we’ll definitely go out tomorrow.”
Then they think to themselves, ‘Once he gets a little older, he’ll play with his friends and won’t even look for Dad. I just need to get through this tiring period somehow.’
Sadly, however, the time we casually let slip away is the most radiant and dazzling season of a father’s life—one that will never come again.
Developmental psychologists agree that the period when children see their parents as their entire world and invincible heroes is far shorter than we imagine. By the upper elementary-school years, or as early as early adolescence, children’s attachment shifts rapidly from their parents to their peers.
Only then, watching their son slam his bedroom door, put on his headphones, and refuse to come out, do fathers begin to voice their hurt.
But time, cruelly, never runs backward. The little boy who used to throw his sweaty arms around Dad and say, “Playing with Dad is the most fun,” has already grown up without a trace of that child remaining.
All those weekends when we fell asleep on the living-room sofa, saying we were tired, were in fact the final golden opportunity for our children to reach out to their hero—Dad.

Of course, playing with an energetic son when you have creaky knees and an empty tank in your forties is almost an extreme sport. Chasing a soccer ball under the blazing sun until you can barely catch your breath, or pushing a bicycle along, naturally makes you wonder, ‘What on earth am I putting myself through on a weekend?’ By the standards of the answer key that says we should dream of perfect rest, this life is undeniably a tiring “wrong answer.”
But when we collapse onto a bench, breathing hard, and face our son’s flushed cheeks as he gulps down cold water, we realize something. A time when we could receive someone’s absolute love and admiration, and sweat alongside him with our whole bodies, will never come again in our lives.
The most beautiful seasons are dazzling precisely because they are always cruelly short.
Tonight, as we welcome the first weekend of September, let’s not turn away from our child’s hopes under the excuse that we are tired. Years from now, when we retire and our hair turns gray, the memories that make us smile will not be the balance in our bank accounts or our positions at work.
It will be the sound of our son’s innocent laughter as he ran toward us with a ball in his arms on a weekend afternoon when autumn sunlight was breaking into pieces, along with the smell of the dust that day. That alone will become the one perfect source of comfort we can draw on for the rest of our lives.
Tomorrow morning, tighten your shoelaces for the child who will wake up rubbing his eyes. The timer on the time you have left to remain the greatest hero in the world is already running down very quickly, even now.
[email protected] Jeon Sang-il Reporter