Sketches from Parenthood, Days 1–30
Hello from the other side
You’re reading Candy for Breakfast, a newsletter about funny feelings, weird careers, making art, American history, and how to be alive. If you’re new here, you might like this month’s earlier piece, The Best (Or Maybe Just Most Top of Mind) Things I Read in 2024.
Free time and productivity. Actually, I’ve always hated the word “productivity,” with its associations of mindless ladder-climbing or podcast gurus hocking complex note-taking workflows and unregulated supplements. Call it what you want; I was worried having a baby would make me have less of it. Say goodbye to your free time, they said. You’ll never get anything done again, they said. Of course, many people have accomplished great things while having kids, but an informal survey of the top-of-mind examples suggests that 100% of them were negligent parents.
So far, though, I actually think that having less free time has been good for me. Now that it’s a rare asset, I’m much more intentional about how I spend it. And I procrastinate much less—it’s easy to put something off when you have the whole day stretching out seductively ahead of you; less so when you only have the thirty-minute window before your kid wakes up. I’ve been spending less time writing, but I haven’t actually written any less.
A lifetime supply of worry and suffering. We celebrated our kid’s eight-day birthday with an ambulance ride to the emergency room, over an issue that’s only funny in retrospect: his breathing was impaired by, of all things, enormous boogers. The doctors used a special machine to suction the snot from his nostrils, but there was no such machine to suction the worry from my brain. For many hours after, I understood intellectually that he was fine, but my body was still flush with residual terror; my brain, seeking to make sense of it all, kept generating increasingly preposterous anxieties, like the possibility that my wife might be kidnapped from outside the hospital when she went to pick up our DoorDash1.
By far the worst part of the experience, though, was the dawning realization that this was just going to keep happening. Not this exact thing, of course; as far as I’ve been able to tell, in all of human history there are no documented examples of asphyxiation by booger2. But there will inevitably be many future instances of similar worry. In deciding to have a baby, I unknowingly committed to a life forever punctuated by moments of sheer terror.
The unpleasantness of such feelings is weirdly absent from the endless discourse about whether or not to have kids. When people walk through that “Should I or shouldn’t I” utilitarian calculus, the entries on the cons list are usually things like loss of freedom, or financial worries, or career impact. I’ve never seen someone say, “One reason not to have kids is because you’ll worry about them for the rest of your life, and that feeling sucks.”
Granted, I don’t think you can decide whether or not to have kids with something as simple as a list of pros and cons. (Honestly, I’m not sure you can decide anything that way.) But it’s still a weird absence.
Seeing boobs. In fifth grade, having recently gained access to the internet but having yet to fully grasp how it worked, I sent an email to boobs@boobs.com and hoped for the best. Incredibly, the good people at boobs.com—or at least, their auto-responder—actually got back to me, with, unsurprisingly, pictures of boobs. The most memorable were the two in the boobs.com logo, where they had replaced the O’s in the word “boobs.” (Note: I couldn’t figure out how to prevent email clients from automatically adding links to the URLs in this paragraph. I recommend not clicking them.)
Beginning from this moment in fifth grade, and lasting farther into adulthood than I’d like to admit, seeing boobs was consistently one of my top priorities in life. That goal has never felt more distant that it does today, now that rote, utilitarian female toplessness has become a background hum in the noise of daily life. My wife has her shirt off constantly, and her boobs have been seen (and, in some cases, groped and analyzed) by an unending stream of family, friends, and medical professionals, not to mention by our actual child.
These days boobs are visible all the time, and yet I barely even notice. If my teenage self could see me now, he’d rue the man I’ve become.
The meaning of life Ponzi scheme. Here’s a thought I had at 5 am that’s probably stupid. (I’ve had hundreds of these over the past few weeks; you’re lucky you’re only getting one.)
Lots of people say they want to have kids to add a source of meaning to their life. That’s not why I did it, but I’ve felt the effect nonetheless—having a baby automatically gives you a long list of reasons to get out of bed in the morning, though admittedly a disproportionate amount of them are poop-related.
But if the problem is a lack of meaning in your life, are you actually solving that problem by having a baby, or are you just passing it on to the next generation? After all, one day your kid is going to grow up and start looking for meaning in their life. So it’s basically just an endless game of hot potato.
Self of Theseus. I don’t know that I ever really thought that having a baby would transform me into a completely different person, at least not right away, but the possibility had certainly occurred to me. So I’m relieved, and perhaps also a touch disappointed, that so far I seem to be pretty much the same as I’ve always been.
While my wife was in labor, my other piece about having a baby started to become one of my most-read essays yet, and every time I checked my phone my inbox was full of new likes and subscriber notifications3. Perhaps such superficial pleasures will no longer hold their former appeal, I thought, now that I’m knee-deep in the miracle of life. But no: that shit felt just as good as it always does. Our selves are tenacious bastards, not so easily eradicated.
Then again, looking at my child, it becomes obvious that change is life’s only constant. Was I myself really a baby as well, way back in the day? The prospect seems impossible, yet all available evidence suggests it’s true. Maybe in another 34 years, my current self will seem just as distant as my newborn self does now.
Now that I know the joys of my child’s unconditional love, adulation from internet strangers means nothing to me, so I don’t even care whether or not you click the like button underneath these footnotes.
I only recently got married, and I still feel weird saying “my wife”—it’s so old-fashioned and stodgy! Plus I always hear it in the Borat voice. I am, however, vehemently opposed to straight people using the term “partner” in almost all circumstances.
There’s at least one fictional example—the scene in Infinite Jest when Don Gately robs one of the Quebecois separatists. Unaware that the victim has a horribly stuffy nose, Gately gags his mouth, and he eventually suffocates.
Note for people who don’t have kids: labor is a long process, and there’s a surprising amount of downtime. I wasn’t checking my phone while my wife was, like, actively birthing our child or anything.