I tell people this all the time, so if you’ve already heard me say it, bear with me: Every cliché about parenthood is true.
Throughout my life, people have offered advice on relationships, growing older, my career, moving in with a significant other, marriage, etc. And while this advice runs the gamut from sage wisdom that bears remembering to pat aphorisms that mean nothing at all, in general I’ve found that none of it perfectly suits my situation. Cleaning up the mess of my life is a bespoke job that requires bespoke solutions - as do we all.
People love to tell you how things are going to go, and I’ve always loved proving them wrong. Not that “people” are always wrong, mind, that’s just my contrary nature. As illustrated in my previous post, I am vain enough to believe in my bone-deep singularity.
But having kids is the same for everybody.
What are the stereotypes? You’ll never be more exhausted in your life; you’ll never be more in love in your life; it’s the most thankless job on Earth; it’s the most important thing you’ll ever do; and, in bold and underlined letters, it never ends.
People without kids don’t like hearing this - I certainly didn’t - but you just don’t know what it’s like until you’re there. Because nothing in your life previous to this point requires such constant attention. You never stop being a parent. Every hour of every day of every year.
What does that mean? It means devoting most of your free time on the weekend to finding ways to divert all of their manic energy. It means having a mental checklist of meals in the fridge, pantry, freezer. It means you worry if they’re getting enough to eat, and you play detective to connect new foods to ones you know they’ve liked so you can try to get them to eat more. It means you worry if they’re getting along with other kids at daycare, and if they’re sad, and why they’re sad, and how amazing it is that they have the capacity to be sad, and if they’ll get sadder as they get older, and if you have the time and money and energy and intellectual capacity to help them deal with that sadness. It means changing diapers in the middle of the night, and the beginning of the night, and the end of the night, and in a parking lot, and in a box and with a fox and in the rain and on a train. It means giving up and ordering fast food or sitting them in front of the television for an hour because every other part of your life can’t wait tonight. It means making up for that by reading them every book they ask you to read tomorrow, even if you haven’t showered, shaved, or had a private bowel movement in days.
And all of this, I know, sounds grueling and no fun at all.
Sometimes it is that. Sometimes being a parent isn’t fun. There are a lot of things that aren’t fun about it - the financial cost, for one.
And yet.
My father died when I was six years old. When I’m reading to my eldest daughter or changing the diaper of my youngest, I am struck by the relentless passage of time, and moved by the knowledge that I am reading the same books my father read to me, probably humming the same tuneless tune he hummed at my crummy bum. Apart from the honest joys of fatherhood is something I did not expect: A reconnection to my dad, a sense of mending a broken circle.
That’s one face of my multifaceted fatherhood.
Another is the growing individuality of Beatrix, my oldest, who every week develops new habits, discards others, adds words to her vocabulary with the sweeping grasp of a crazed lepidopterist, finds ordinary things funny (simply saying the word “bowl”), and spontaneously detests mundane operations like moving a chair too close to the window.
She’s figured out how to make Mario jump. Getting him to jump and walk at the same time is, as far as she can tell, the game’s solitary objective.
It’s easy to complain about the chores of parenthood, because the things that make you tire or tense are universal. You don’t need to be a parent to understand how exhausting it is. Harder to describe is the euphoria that accompanies the simplest thing.
Last night I was lying on the couch reading a book as Beatrix mulled over a plate of macaroni and peas. When she finished with that, she wandered into the living room, grabbed her stuffed rabbit, and climbed up onto the couch to lie on top of me.
How do I begin to describe the warmth of the emotion that welled inside me, or the high-pitched screech of every masculine part of my internal machinery grinding to a shuddering halt?
A child has the unique superpower to render everything else in a parent’s life into meaningless noise. There is a little person who lives in my house that trusts me implicitly, who seeks me out when I’m not around, and who burrows into my arms like a tousle-headed otter.
There’s a lyric from a Mountain Goats song that’s been running through my head since last night, and so far it’s the best way I know to sum up how I feel about my kid:
the most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway
is that it's you
and that you're standing in the doorway