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I apologize if this is intrusive, please feel free to ignore if so. (I am asking mostly because I would like more information on this topic for myself, not to stalk you.) How do you feel about having had children? Is there anything about parenthood that isn't as you expected? Do you feel that you still have a full life yourself?
I love having kids and am delighted to have them and plan to have some more. It’s incredibly cool that something can be that valuable and I can just manufacture ‘em at home with ingredients I already possess. (Hi, spouse.)
They are a lot, though. I recommend to anyone on the fence about having kids who can feasibly arrange it to live with - not babysit, not even necessarily do a ton of caretaking for, but just live in the same house as - young children. There’s not a great way to convey the merciless relentlessness of having a child who insists on continuing to exist and want and need regardless of how much sleep you got, how sick you are, how many times you have already read that book, how tired your arms or how aching your feet, how hungry or sweaty or needy-for-cognition you’ve gotten, how much or little support happens to be available that day. It’s a lot. I have a ton of support, and I also have more support now than I did when my first was new. Not coincidentally, I barely remember my first baby’s infancy and am enjoying the second one lots more. I was not getting enough sleep to form many long-term memories, first time. Lots of people tolerate sleep deprivation better than I do, to be clear, but you need to be aware that it’s a whole fuck of a lot.
But man, they’re so cool? If you spend that much time around a little person you get to be able to read them pretty well and they’re doing such cognitively fascinating things constantly, you get to watch all kinds of atomic human concepts be broken down into pieces by the force of a tiny mind trying to grow. Probably not everyone gets a kid as cool as mine, who is four and can read and do her own D&D arithmetic and play a competent game of chess and rack up hundreds of XP on Duolingo a day, but my understanding is that people whose kids are less objectively cool also find things to appreciate about them. Also did you know babies in addition to being adorably incompetent are soft, and smell good, and if you have your own baby nobody will think it’s very weird if you put your entire face on your baby for these reasons even well past the point it would be super weird with somebody else’s baby, and also if you are fortunate your baby might laugh about it?
Diapers are nothing and sleep is everything. Parents aren’t better at parenting tasks because of magic or even because they responsibly read the entire parenting manual, they’re better at them because they are forced to practice way way way more than anyone would naturally choose to practice any such tasks (and accordingly your skills will be uneven depending on how you divide those tasks). Like many things, parenting is subject to the novel intervention effect where if you try something that seems like it might help, it will probably help, but only for a little while, so your creativity is very much a limiting factor on your effectiveness. Your house will not be clean for several years unless you throw really quite a lot of money or time at it. The constantly asking “why” thing is not an imaginary stereotype, they actually do that. Teething is bad. Sleep training is bad and the only thing worse than sleep training is not sleep training (some people can get by with co-sleeping or whatever, we can’t.) You will spend a truly unreasonable amount of time thinking about and discussing human waste.
I do not feel that I have given up anything I was in fact doing to have kids. However, this has something do to with the stuff I was in fact doing. My hobbies are writing and reading and faffing about on the Internet and cooking. You will notice I did not include, say, exciting travel, or actually anything that takes me out of my house or renders me unavailable for more than a couple hours in a row. Do some people have kids and also hobbies that involve leaving their house for more than a couple hours in a row? Sure! How do they do that? I have no earthly clue, I had to negotiate with my coparents to arrange those couple hours twice weekly in which I can go sit in the yard and read half a novel without being festooned with children. (I’m the primary caretaker; my coparents would have less necessary negotiation to do that sort of thing. I on the other hand have been asking permission to take showers for the last four years because the buck stops with me unless I make really sure someone else is aware that they have taken possession of the buck and can’t drop it in my lap until I re-emerge.) Maybe they hire more babysitters (we’ve managed to almost totally avoid leaving the kids with strangers), maybe they embark on logistics projects in order to have their kids come with them whitewater rafting or whatever, I don’t know. Ask one of them. My life is basically like it was before except now it is 85% kids by volume. It turned out the rest of it compressed pretty well, with some adjustments.
Look at my preternaturally photogenic baby.
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