Probably the best question I’ve gotten as a new dad is “So how does it feel?” For some reason I have a different answer every time.
Before the arrival of our little girl, my spouse and I somewhat sneered at the idea that parenthood is “life changing.” I’m hear to report from the other side that we were right and wrong at the same time, but mostly right.
Both of us are bookish, fairly introverted, well educated. When someone says “it changed my life” we assumed they meant some sort of deep philosophical shift, an existential cataclysm. Hence our thinly masked disbelief that having a child would change our view of the world. We’re both mature and have been through a lot in life. We didn’t have children in our lives much, but we knew what it’s about.
My weltanschauung has not changed, or if it has, not by much. I’ll allow that it will change over time–how could it not? Parenthood is indeed a momentous change in one’s life, but if you’re a mature person, it is a visceral, essentially material change, not existential. You are pushed to the edge physically and mentally with your first child as you race to keep up with all the demands of the baby and somehow maintain a few threads of dignity in the maintenance of your home. Your body is filled with adrenaline and some sort of parenting hormones that make you feel like a superhero in the first few days.
I’ll admit that I’ve been seeing people a bit differently here and there, especially youthful strangers–early twenties and teens. You can still sort of see the baby in them, yet they are adults, and you are acutely aware that someone cared for them the way we are caring for our baby, and you feel that you can almost sense the presence of their parents. So there’s a kind of connectedness that comes to the foreground. I’ve already felt that before, plenty of times, but I can see how a young parent might be blown away by feelings like these.
On the negative side, I have almost zero patience for bullshit right now. Right and wrong are clear as a bell, I’m sleep deprived, and I have something to protect. It’s as though all my patience has gone into caring for our baby and making sure my wife is getting rested, etc. I love them dearly, but frankly it’s involuntary, visceral. I just hope I don’t veer off into being needlessly rude to someone at work at some point. In a physical confrontation I would submit that a new parent (1st few weeks) is possibly one of the most dangerous human beings you could ever tangle with.
In the spirit of sleep deprivation and gotta feed the baby, I’m not going to edit this much. It’s going up as is.
