Having a Kid Is Already Fucking Me Up and He Hasn't Even Been Born Yet
Having a Kid Is Already Fucking Me Up and He Hasn't Even Been Born Yet
The most anxiety-inducing part of taking psychedelic drugs—especially those first few times—happens when you’re still sober. Or at least, it did for me. It was always during the anticipation, the hour-ish interregnum while I waited for whatever it was to kick in, that I felt the strangest. I knew I’d just done something that was going to change me—perhaps irrevocably, but at the very least, for the next six to eight hours—but nothing had actually happened yet, and all I could do was sit tight, my head whirling, my stomach an infinite pit, bracing myself for what was coming, even as I knew I didn’t really have any idea what that was.
I didn’t appreciate that feeling at the time, in my rush to become the kind of jaded explorer who had seen it all before. But when it faded away, with age and experience, a part of me started to miss it. It’s easy to be nostalgic for things you didn’t actually enjoy at the time, maybe even easier than it is for less ambiguous pleasures.
Turns out, though, that feeling wasn’t gone forever. Lately I’ve been hit with its echoes, as I count down to the start of a completely different experience.
I suppose the title already gave it away: I’m having a baby. My vocabulary is full of strange new words, the package deliveries have reached letters-down-the-Dursley’s-chimney levels, and my ChatGPT history is stuffed with questions I probably should have asked a doctor. Welcome to my parenting blog.
For most of my life I exclusively thought about pregnancy in the context of how to avoid one. I guess I figured I’d probably have kids eventually, in much the same way one idly assumes they might someday visit Paris, or take up yoga. When I hit the age where the question started coming up on dates, I’d tell people that I leaned towards having kids, but wouldn't consider it a dealbreaker if I found someone great who didn't want them. You never truly know what your dealbreakers are until you meet them face to face, though, and when I actually did find someone like that, it turned out it was.
I don’t have any grand reasons for wanting to reproduce. In fact I think people, especially writer types, often lie to themselves by inventing intellectual explanations for things that are really just instinct. If forced to explain myself, I suppose it’s as simple as the fact that parenthood seems like a significant part of the potential human experience, and I’ve always been pretty into experiencing stuff. I already know what not having kids is like, so I might as well see what it’s like on the other side.
People keep asking me if I’m excited to have a baby, and while I don’t know if that’s the first word I’d turn to, I am deeply curious, and I suspect that sufficiently deep curiosity may not actually be that distinguishable from excitement. It’s kind of like the way you might feel before trying a weird food, or going to an intriguing stranger’s party. No matter how I end up feeling about parenting in the end, I’m confident the whole thing will have been worth it just to find out what it’s like.
Thomas Jefferson thought the United States might need a revolution every twenty years. I’m not sure that’s true of the country, but I endorse the sentiment in one’s personal life. It’s good to blow up your whole world every now and then, but it’s not always easy, which is why you usually need to trick yourself into it. It’s probably good that pregnancy lasts as long as it does1—would anyone ever decide to have a baby if they had to start dealing with it the following day? We all end up with lives chosen by past versions of ourselves, people so different from our present selves that they might as well be strangers.
Which is not to say I’d want things any other way. Leaps into the unknown are part of what keeps life exciting, even if sometimes the surprise at the other end is just getting slapped in the face over and over.
I keep searching for metaphors to describe how I’m feeling right now, but none of them seem to get it quite right. It’s sort of like I’m living in a lucid dream. Or maybe it’s more like the feeling you get when you’re on a long vacation, or traveling for work, and you start to think of yourself as almost a different person. My old life is already over—these are just the aftershocks. I go about my little routines, aware that they’re about to be completely disrupted; I think my little thoughts, aware that they’re about to be shoved out of my head and replaced with new ones.
A catch-22: every new parent worries about parenthood becoming their whole identity, but since this fear is itself a part of parenthood, worrying about it only makes it that much more real. It’s not like I want this newsletter to become a parenting blog, it’s just that it’s impossible to write about anything else right now. I sneer at those people who put “husband and father” in their Twitter bios, but here I am doing basically the same thing, only less concisely.
Perhaps it’s unavoidable, though, that this is the lens through which I’ll end up being perceived. Many of my friends’ parents have done interesting things with their lives, but I still think of them first and foremost as my friends’ parents. As for my own parents, they clearly didn’t exist until I was born, and any photos that seem to indicate otherwise are obviously forgeries.
It’s like the old joke goes:
A man walks into a bar, and sits down. He starts a conversation with an old guy next to him. The old guy has obviously had a few. He says to the man:
“You see that dock out there? Built it myself, hand crafted each piece, and it's the best dock in town! But do they call me ‘McGregor the dock builder’? No! And you see that bridge over there? I built that, took me two months, through rain, sleet and scorching weather, but do they call me ‘McGregor the bridge builder’? No! And you see that pier over there, I built that, best pier in the county! But do they call me ‘McGregor the pier builder’? No!”
The old guy looks around, and makes sure that nobody is listening, and leans to the man, and he says:
“But you fuck one sheep…”
You spend all this time worrying about what to do with your life, racking up accomplishments, wondering how you’ll be defined. And then you have one kid…
Here’s another parallel between psychedelics and kids: the magic of both is almost always lost in the transition to words. When I’m at a party and someone starts describing a drug experience, I immediately look for an exit to a better conversation. My worst nightmare is being “that guy” about kids, oblivious to the fact that all my thoughts about parenthood are boring and unoriginal.
Something I’ve discovered as this newsletter has grown is that being read by one person who knows you is far more stressful than being read by a thousand strangers. I never worry about getting canceled by the mob, or even just unsubscribed from en masse, but whenever I bump into an old acquaintance and they let slip that they’ve read something I’ve written, I invariably cringe. I used to dread the moment when a woman I was on a second date with confessed that she’d read this newsletter. Then I started worrying about what my mother-in-law thinks. And now I have to consider the possibility that my future child will one day have access to all of my stupidest thoughts.
Perhaps the best-case scenario is that he shows a complete lack of interest in anything about my life, much as I did with my own parents. Alternatively, maybe I just won’t teach him to read.
I’ve been struggling with the conclusion to this piece, probably because the story I’m telling itself hasn’t concluded yet. Really, it hasn’t even started. Imagine if that guy I was complaining about earlier finished his drug story with “and then I waited for it to kick in. The end.”
Besides, perhaps whatever follows will render all this preemptive analysis embarrassingly beside the point. It’s a running joke that if you get too high you’ll be stuck like that forever, but I actually will be stuck like this forever. In a way my kid and I are both waiting for a similar moment. He’s about to be born for the first time; I’m about to be reborn. I’ll let you know how it goes—if I even remember who I used to be.
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My wife might disagree.