You become.
The teacher for my son’s parent toddler class gave all of the parents a copy of this on the last day of class. It’s adapted from The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams. At the top of the page, the teacher said, this says something about the way we sometimes feel as parents.
Read it, and tell me if you think she’s right 
. Personally, it makes me all weepy every time I read it.
"What is real?" asked the Rabbit one day
when they were lying side by side.
"Does it mean having things that buzz inside you
And a stick-out handle?" "Real isn’t how you’re made."
said the skin horse. "It’s a thing that happens to you
When a child loves you for a long, long time
not just to play with but really loves you–
then you become real." "Does it hurt?" asked Rabbit.
"Sometimes," said the skin-horse (for he was always truthful),
"When you are real you don’t mind being hurt."
"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up or bit by bit?"
"It doesn’t happen all at once. You become. It takes a
long time,
That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break
easily, or have sharp edges, or have to be carefully
kept. Generally, by the time you are real, most of
your hair has been loved off and your eyes drop out
and you get loose at the joints and very shabby.
But these things don’t
matter at all because once you are real,
you can’t be ugly, except to people
who don’t understand"
Indeed.
