So I’d initially intended to start this blog when my daughter was still a baby, but she’s now three and it’s obvious that parenthood got in the way of doing that, and so many other things. I think that might be a good starting point for what this is all about: real thoughts on parenting from a real person. I have absolutely no goal here – this is my hobby, I have no goals other than to try to teach myself a little website stuff and play with a few technologies I’ve wanted to learn while putting some writing out there for the world to read to get a bit more practice. If you read it, great! I hope it’s useful. If you hate it, there’s a lot of internet out there so I’d kindly invite you to head out into that great big wild and not worry so much about what some random stranger thinks.
So, onto the observations…
Time is Both Friend and Enemy
The amount of time I have for all the things I need to do – dad stuff, husband stuff, homeowner stuff, and work stuff – is just so radically compressed when you become a parent. The world tends to tell new parents they just have no time at all, which is absolutely true in year one. But as time goes on and the kiddo starts going to daily childcare, has a few wider babysitter options, and generally can be left for more than 90 seconds without attempting to jam a fistful of jacks into their mouth time gets more flexible. It doesn’t get anymore plentiful, so time itself stays finite, but the ways in which you can use it expands. Time works in your favor this way: you can choose where to spend your time and the frequency of that choice being made for you goes way down. It gets fun in its own way to try to line your days up to work for you, the family, and the overall administrative state of parenthood.
The way that time works against you in parenthood is mainly a selfish observation: time for yourself becomes less of a true escape from the mental load of parenting and instead just attenuates it slightly. I try hard to balance my share of the parenting load out against my wife’s very intentionally, and I think we do it better than most. I put a lot of effort into making sure my wife has time to rest and recharge, and she does likewise for me. We’re both introverts, so we need our introvert alone time in equal proportions. So the challenge is that any time you spend for yourself tends to be mortgaged against the future commitments that will entail. It makes each moment doing things that are solely for yourself – recreation, self-care, socialization – feel like it’s always time borrowed from future you. I’ve been surprised by how difficult it’s become to be deeply in the moment at those times and eventually, tends to makes self-focused time induce a level of guilt I wasn’t prepared for.
You Actually Can Prepare for It
So many people told me that you can’t ever truly prepare for becoming a parent and I think that’s utter bullshit. Especially for men, this triggers whatever monkey-brain, energy conservation instincts that are still buried deep in our amygdalae and prompts some bad logic: if one cannot prepare, why bother trying? I’ve seen so many fellow dads either take their partner’s lead by doing the things we’ve all seen in Steve Martin movies: building cribs, picking baby room decor, wrestling with baby gear that’s clearly been designed by someone whose exposure to human children seems to be limited to having read about them in books. But when it comes to self-directed preparation for themselves, as fathers-to-be, not as husbands of moms, we seem to just wait around until baby day. Obviously, this is changing in our culture and I personally love seeing dads out there who really do their own preparation, but so many dads I’ve seen could’ve spent the run-up to birthday doing things that can help immensely when dad-to-be becomes just dad.
First, spend some time unfucking yourself. This is different for everyone. For me, it was emotional. I had a very complicated, sometimes deeply unhealthy relationship with my own mother, and it made things across my entire life difficult in ways that I could only understand fully with the help of a therapist. Mental health is health, full stop. And fatherhood is demanding (but rewarding!) of your mind, body, and soul. On that last bit first: the soul part, the year leading up to baby day is primetime for working on unfucking your marriage. If there are flaws in your marriage, you can bet your ass they’ll only be magnified by having kids. There’s no way to eliminate those flaws because we’re humans, but we can mitigate their impact on us as fathers, on our partners, and eventually, on our kids. Take the athlete’s mindset: go back and work on your fundamentals again. We all get better at the relationship game by papering over some of our weaknesses the same way that athletes can. It’s the relationship equivalent of not being able to shoot lefty, skate backwards, or make an offhand catch. Sure you can make it pretty far with those weaknesses, but you’ll work ten times as hard as someone who’s run the the drill on it and fixed that already. Run the drill. Fix all the muscle memory you’ve accumulated that’s holding you back, whether it’s a bad temper, bad communication skills, time management, romantic connections. Whatever it is, if you suck at it now, you’re all but guaranteed to suck at it a hundred times worse once you become a father.
Second, read a book. Hell, read two or three. But here’s the thing: make sure you pick the books for who and what you are. In this age of algorithmic trendsetting and mass culture, it’s gotten even harder to find real-world, long-form advice books on fatherhood specifically that match the wide range of fathers out there. I don’t mean this statement to bemoan the plight of dads. We’ve had it pretty easy historically, but it’s a new time and some of us want to read something a bit more topical that What to Expect when You’re Expecting which is 100% written for moms and less cash-grabby than whatever platitudes some dad-bro celebrity unswallowed into prose and onto Oprah’s book list that week. Most popular books written for men approaching fatherhood I’ve found to be either massively infantilizing and use the same tired tropes from generations ago just repackaged for the modern era. HEY DAD! CHANGES. ARE. A-COMIN! Are you ready dad? Your wife’s about to become a hormonal demon and your entire life will be top to tail emasculation fest