‘What is the point of having kids if your life ends when theirs begins?’

So I headed to a place where I knew I’d find fathers struggling with unemployment, unpaid bills and bad decisions: the shelter for D.C.’s homeless families.

Outside in the cold rain was Juan Jordan, 45, pushing a stroller back and forth, trying to soothe his fussy 8-month-old daughter, Kai.

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Jordan, 45, lost his job as a building engineer and can’t begin a new one until he can get a child-care voucher for Kai. Her mother has disappeared, and he’s the primary caregiver — one of only two single dads at the shelter. Before the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless fought to get him a bed at the shelter, he and Kai spent two months sleeping on friends’ couches, on the street or in abandoned cars.

I tried to imagine Kai sleeping on the street, in her pink knit cap, with her huge eyes and fat cheeks. Her pacifier fell when she opened her mouth wide to smile, and she kicked her feet in that joyous, baby glee.

I looked at her father. “Any regrets?” I asked him. “If you had to do it all over again, would you not have had her?”

“Nah. What else would I be doing that means anything?” Jordan replied. “You just change your priorities. And now, she’s my priority.”

I got the same story from James McClain, the other single dad at the shelter. He has sole custody of his 6-year-old boy. “Before him, I knew nothing but the street,” McClain said.

Parenthood was transformative for these dads. While it may be crushing day to day, their kids give these men a compass, a purpose.

I don’t think Jamel needs that. He just needs more certainty about what his life might look like five years from now. He told me that he has a girlfriend he’ll “probably” marry but that he already has cold feet. “My trepidation has nothing to do with her,” he said. “It has everything to do with the subject matter of your column.”

So I think Jamel needs to hear from all of you.

Are the incredible rewards of children — those moments of total love that sweep over you in that endless existence of exhaustion and frustration — worth the obliteration of your old life?

Tell us, readers: Amid all the wrapping paper, tears, dreidel fights, hot chocolate spills, pouts and 5 a.m. wake-up calls, would you do it all over again?