Parenting at Five

It was some time on the night of December 28, 2010, I think—two days after a two-foot blizzard, a few hours after the Eagles found a way to lose to a team quarterbacked by a guy who now returns punts for the Carolina Panthers—that I finally lost it.

Convinced that my 5-day-old daughter, Rebecca, was suffocating, I tore at the sheets in our bed to free her.  I think I started to yell.  The alarm clock may have been going off.  It was 2:30 or 3.  Maybe it was really December 30.  I can’t remember.

All I know is that, when my wife, Meredith, came in to our room holding Rebecca and asked me what the hell I was doing, I realized that I had entered a new phase of my life.

I was fucked.

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People sometimes ask me why Meredith and I decided to start our family when we were so “young.” (I was 27 when we had our first child; she was 25).  In some ways, the question says more about our times than it does about us.  In 1980, the year after my older sister was born, the mean age for an American women giving birth to her first child was 22.7.  By 2010, when Rebecca was born, that number had increased to 25.4.

The question also says plenty about class and economics. Take a look at the numbers in the last paragraph again. A woman born in 1985 would generally be considered a millennial, part of the generation that supposedly never wants to settle down or enter family life. Yet many of these women were settling down (or at least having children) as the 2010s started. The expectation that we would delay having children had as much to do with our other defining characteristics—advanced degrees, reasonably good prospects for high incomes—as it did our generation.

Whatever the reason for the question, I’d like to be able to say we have some sort of interesting answer. But the truth is that we just sort of felt like having kids. Or, at least from my perspective, we didn’t go out that much, and having children seemed compatible with working and watching baseball. So it looked like the kiddos would just slide right into the life we had already built.

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There are two ways to survive the first year of parenting without going crazy, and only one if you are prone to alcohol-induced psychoses.

You have to give up. You have to surrender the idea that the image you had for yourself as a mother or father will ever match the reality. You have to accept that your time, your energy, your thoughts, even—they are not your own anymore.

The rub is that having kids doesn’t really change your desire for any of those things (time, energy, thoughts). Maybe at the margins a little. Maybe you realize that 10 hours of football on Sundays was a little much. Maybe you come to grips with the fact that no one else watches 1-vs.-16 games in the NCAA Tournament all the way to the bitter, 47-point-blowout end.

But you are who you are, and when you miss the whole Eagles game because when else are you going to get three hours of uninterrupted sleep, you aren’t going to just be cool with it because something something, the miracle of life, something something.

So when you give up, it’s not to make yourself happy. It’s with the understanding that, sometimes, there is no happiness to be found. Sometimes, the best you can say for yourself is that when things got hard, you didn’t run.

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Before junior year in college, my parents drove me to the Midwest so that I could move all my stuff into my new apartment.  At one point during the drive, my parents asked how I was feeling.

“I’m OK,” I said.  Then I thought for a minute: “You know, I’m pretty happy.  But I don’t think I’ll ever be truly happy until I have my own kids.”

My thinking was this: Most of our lives, we act selfishly.  We focus on our own wants and needs and, though we genuinely care about others, we rarely if ever put them first.  This leads us to be unhappy because chasing our selfish desires doesn’t really fulfill us.  It just appeases parts of us—our ego, our need for validation—that can be satisfied for only brief moments before they crave reinforcement.

When you have kids, I reasoned, this changes.  Because you are forced to put others first, you transcend the selfish, baser parts of yourself and gain an actual sense of self-worth.

Now, before you laugh at this, keep in mind that I was 20 at the time, had no kids, didn’t know anyone remotely close to my age who was raising kids and owned a fake ID that misspelled Massachusetts.  And did I mention I was 20?

Years later, I would recall this conversation during an hours-long walk on a January night in Chicago with my father.  As I admitted to him that I wasn’t having a lot of fun being a father—that I found myself disconnected at times from my 13-month-old daughter and bored by much of my life—he started laughing.

“Yeah, a lot of parenting young kids sucks,” he said. He explained, by the time I was 3 and my sister was 6, he was dead set against having a third kid. He didn’t want to deal with three more years of sleepless nights and dirty diapers. He could, as he put it, “see the light at the end of the tunnel.”

He told me he remembered 20-year-old me saying that he would need to have kids to find meaning in life.  He kept quiet.  He knew I’d learn eventually.

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People who don’t have kids like to talk about what they’ll do when they’re parents, which is both perfectly understandable and laughably stupid.  To paraphrase a great philosopher, “Everyone has a plan until the baby has colic.”

The truth is that parenting in the 21st Century is a lot like being a fan of the 2015 Eagles: “Damn, that’s the third episode in a row of Paw Patrol she’s watched this morning, and she didn’t eat her breakfast really, not unless you count half of a chocolate-chip granola bar as breakfast, and I really need to start actually washing her hair at night instead of just pouring water in it, but, whoa, she still seems pretty normal.  I can’t believe we’re only down 10.  We can do this!  Wait, what the hell is Byron Maxwell doing?”

You have to learn to take small victories. (If you can go 7-9, you should feel really proud.  Unless you’re a jerk like Chip Kelly.  And even then, you can’t be fired).  You have to envision a bigger picture that probably doesn’t exist and keep it in your head every time your baby falls off the bed, chair, changing table or other allegedly baby-proof device onto the floor. You have to treasure the good moments, not because life is a Hallmark card but because it isn’t, and if you don’t enjoy the positives, you might not make it.

A couple of months ago, as I attempted (word chosen intentionally) to drag (word again chosen intentionally) Rebecca and Sarah to school, Sarah stopped walking in the concourse for the Broad Street Line and sat down. I tried the old, “I’m still walking, see you later, Sarah,” routine, which apparently even a 2-year-old would find unconvincing. But Becca, who had just turned 5, was worried.

“We can’t leave her!” she yelled at me, and then ran back and reached out her hand to her younger sister. Together, they walked towards me, giggling.

Somehow, after five years of long nights, temper tantrums, potty training and instructions not to ride her sister like a pony, at the moment when I needed it the most, Becca had displayed a level of empathy often lacking in people 10 times her age.

It didn’t make it all feel worth it. But damn, it felt good.