Unexpected Stuff From the First Year of Parenthood
Prepare to go to WAR! you’re not going to sleep for YEARS! your sex life is OVER! This will be the HARDEST THING YOU EVER DO!!! …not really?
crossposted with delay from my main blog
One year ago my daughter was born. This is the single most monumental thing to ever happen to me. Obviously it’s given me plenty of great fodder for insightful blog posts!
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*crickets*
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It’s surprisingly hard to write anything interesting about having a baby, because you’ve already heard all the clichés, and they’re all true. In the last post I talked about how there’s a type of knowledge that can only be acquired by direct experience: it’s like when you’re tripping on mushrooms or something and it occurs to you that love really is the answer, and you feel this in an intense, visceral way, like the universe has revealed a deep truth to you. And then the next day you’re telling someone about your trip, feeling how stupid and trivial it is to try and make words that in any way capture the awe and depth of this experience, and they’re like yeah, cool man. Uh, no doubt.
So yeah, all the clichés are true: it goes way too fast, it gets easier, treasure every moment, take lots of photos and videos, everything’s a phase, you can’t really prepare for this.
Anyway. After wracking my shrivelled little raisin of a new-parent brain, I did manage to come up with a few things that were unexpected.
Parents are like vampires
Before you get turned into a vampire, you can’t imagine wanting to drink blood. After you turn, you can’t imagine not wanting to drink blood.
This is exactly what parenthood is like. From the point of view of a couple of yo-pros enjoying the fruits of modern life, you’d be completely fucking bonkers to have children. You’ve finally got some stability, a decent job, free time for hobbies. Why throw that away?
Call this the Seth Rogen position:
Personality traits are pretty stable throughout life. Seth Rogen is in his forties: he could very reasonably predict he will enjoy blazing up and watching movies for the rest of his life.
But there are rare transformative experiences that make a mockery of attempts to model your future desires. This is the vampire problem: you can’t do an expected utility calculation if you’re going to transform into a different person with new wants and desires.1
And so it’s hard to reason yourself into the decision to have kids. You just have to yolo it and let biology take the wheel.
I think this partly explains why parents tend to close ranks and spend less and less time with their childfree friends. Parents are on the other side of a Kierkegaardian leap of faith: if you know, you know. Spending time with your nephews and nieces or having a ‘fur baby’ is not the same thing. It seems like it from the outside! I thought so until very recently. But it’s not.
This is unfalsifiable and sounds kinda snobbish. I’m definitely not saying parents are superior beings. But they are different beings.
(creatures of the night, shirtfronts stained vermilion with pureed vegetables, avoiding their reflection in mirrors…)
When the midwife passed the baby up into my fiancee’s arms, she transformed into a mother in that moment. Something about her bearing changed. Her face changed. Trumpets blared and thunder rolled. Prior to that moment, she wasn’t a mother. Then the baby arrived and a switch flipped and nothing would ever be the same.
The vampirification process seems to happen more slowly for some people (especially for dads) but it does eventually happen—at least, most of the time2
Many (most?) dads take a long time to love their kids
An interesting dark secret that I discovered by lurking on reddit forums is that a lot of dads feel nothing for their young children, to the point of wondering if they’ve made a huge mistake. Whenever a new dad confesses to the intense guilt they are feeling about this, a bunch of other dads jump into the comments to say, don’t worry bro, they felt exactly the same way, and now their one/two/three year old is the love of their life, and they could never imagine life without them.
This should be completely unsurprising, in that newborns are not actually people. Human infants are born way earlier than other mammals to prevent their big-ass heads from getting stuck in the birth canal, meaning they’re still fetuses for another three months. Objectively speaking, they are grotesque little homunculi (we thought we had one of the rare cute ones, then laughed our asses off when we looked back at the newborn pictures recently). They can’t smile. They can’t even make eye contact. They give absolutely nothing back: they are quite literally parasites, in that mother and fetus are engaged in an arms race for nutrients.
Even after they become aware of your existence, they are sociopaths: they burble and laugh while they try to gouge your eyes out with their stinky, milk-encrusted talons. It is a miracle that anyone loves them at all.
(DFW wrote a very funny and sad story about this, which we discussed in a recent book club: I talk about my fatherhood experience around ~35 mins).
UPDATE: uploaded it to Youtube with a timestamp to the relevant bit:
Interestingly, I never went through this crisis of faith. I loved my daughter from the moment she was born, albeit in a more abstract way than I do now. Partly this must be luck of the draw, but I think I also did some things that made it easier to bond with her.
Gender essentialism is weaker than I thought
Dads typically go back to work two weeks after the baby is born. For a variety of reasons, this seems completely fucked to me. Fortunately I don’t have a real job, so I was able to spend several months as a co-parent.
I gave my daughter her first syringes of colostrum on day one. I changed her nappies, soothed her to sleep, burped her, etc. Obviously I couldn’t breastfeed, but I gave her one of her daily feeds with expressed milk.
One year later, my daughter has no preference whatsoever between us. Now that her mum has gone back to work, I’m doing about two-thirds of the childcare, and it’s going fine.
This was slightly surprising! I guess I thought that women would naturally be better at looking after children, at least at the overall population level (i.e. without saying anything about the capabilities of any individual man or woman). I still think that’s probably true, but my experience has reminded me just how much of this stuff is socially constructed.
Women are the gatekeepers of men stepping up as parents
This happened right from the very outset, in the birthcare ward, where nurses would make little remarks like ‘oh, dad must have changed this nappy’ or ‘I guess dad set up this carseat huh’. These were fairly innocuous comments which may not be representative, but come on! Do you want men to be capable hands-on parents, or not?3
Anyway, it’s interesting that the only suggestion that childrearing is women’s work has come exclusively from middle-aged or older women. But it’s also a tiny sample size, and most people seem to be totally on board.
Giving specific advice to new parents is pointless
Babies are eight pounds of pure entropy. They are incapable of creating order, but they have a real talent for chaos. While most living things work hard to maintain homeostasis in their organs and vital systems, babies work tirelessly to gum up the works in a frankly ridiculous number of ways.
The set of problems you might encounter is vast. The set of possible solutions is not only large, but highly idiosyncratic: every baby is different!
At first we were surprised by how often professionals would give directly-contradictory advice, e.g. a midwife would tell us to dab a cool cloth on baby’s neck to keep her from falling asleep while nursing, then a lactation consultant would come along and say ‘what are you doing? That’s cruel, you should tickle her feet instead’.
It turns out that with a few important exceptions, there is no ‘right’ way to do anything. All you can really do is try different strategies and see what works (It’s a good time to be practiced in the art of n=1 self-experimentation).
This explains a lot of tropes about e.g. new parents getting annoyed by unsolicited advice. It can be very useful as inspiration, but not when it’s delivered as if it were the only correct way. Whatever worked for you was almost certainly idiosyncratic to that particular child!
Changing nappies is just not a big deal
I thought this would be more of a central feature of parenthood, but it is just not something you think about: it usually takes about two minutes, and it’s not even that gross, especially when they’re newborns (I kinda liked the smell of the milk-only poop, like freshly-baked bread).
Babies don’t necessarily ruin your life/sleep/sanity
Prepare to go to WAR! you’re not going to sleep for YEARS! your sex life is OVER! you’re going to be up to your elbows in SHIT! This will be the HARDEST THING YOU EVER DO!!!
…not really?
Everyone is always touching my arm sensitively and asking me stuff like, ‘how are you sleeping?’ with the tone of voice you might use with a stage four cancer patient and I’m like… uh, fine, clocking 7 hours on average. Or, how about those poo-splosions, eh? And I’m like, man, that’s happened so few times that it doesn’t even feature in what I think about. This is not a central feature of parenthood for me.
I think partly what’s happening here is that you only tend to hear war stories. It’s boring to say, oh yeah my kid sleeps pretty well, eats pretty well, we’re tired but things are generally fine, especially when other parents are doing it tough.
Then the other part of what happens is this idiosyncratic thing, where every parent experience a totally different set of problems, and thinks that they’re universal to everyone: colic, or tongue-ties, or diarrhoea, or constipation, or vomiting, or sleep training. If you combined all of these problems you genuinely would have a nightmarish experience. And some unlucky people do get a bunch of them at once. But mostly, you won’t.
I definitely have an unusual and privileged experience of parenthood. The major axes on which difficulty can vary might be something like:
baby’s health and temperament
your health and energy levels
financial/work situation
relationship with baby momma/daddy
help from family
On which I’m pretty much maxed out on the first four, and solid on the fifth.
So I’m playing on easy mode here, but I still think it’s worth sharing my experience to counteract some of the negativity: it’s been hard at times, but I think this has actually been the best year of my entire life.4
Notes:
I learned about the vampire problem from the philosopher L.A. Paul’s appearance on EconTalk.
It’s very hard hard to find reliable studies on how many parents regret having children. My best guess when I looked into this was that it could be as high as 10 per cent, but you can reduce your chances massively by not having children at the wrong time/in the wrong circumstances/with the wrong person. Then, of course, you have to compare that number with the proportion of childless people who regret not having children. Then you carefully do all the math, write it on a bit of paper, throw it away, and do whatever you were going to do anyway.
I have a deep nostalgic love for The Simpsons, but the bumbling idiot/deadbeat dad trope has probably done real harm in the world (see also: and anti-nuclear scaremongering). Joke about the outcomes you want!
Right after I wrote this I had the worst night in months, compounded by yet another round of daycare sickness, culminating in the cancellation of a hang with a friend, and realised oh yeah, I also might just be totally delusional! I guess it doesn’t matter: perception is reality.