With the birth of my daughter likely just a few weeks away, it's difficult to parse and make sense of
what's on my mind. It's a combination of nervousness, excitement, fear of not being ready, confusion, and (to be honest) a bit of mourning for my soon-to-be-gone, childless life. I thought I might write a few paragraphs tonight on this, just to reflect and keep something in writing for the future - maybe one day I'll find this silly, who knows?
***
Those who know me know I vacillated for years on whether to
pursue parenthood in the first place. I have
always envied (and perhaps will envy, moving forward) the childless couple, free to be
the generous uncle or aunt, able to spend time with friends’ and relatives’
children, then go home and have some peace and quiet at the end of the
day. I also saw the financial benefit to
never having children. To be brutally
honest, what we’re giving up by having this child is the near certainty of (a)
retirement around age fifty, plus (b) having the ability to easily and less
nervously travel the world afterward, or hop from cruise ship to cruise ship if
we wanted. For what in the world would
we give up such a rare privilege?
A great deal, actually.
In my humble opinion, people should without a doubt abstain from having
children if that’s their true feeling, but ultimately I wanted the ability to
write every possible chapter in my life (including the one involving saliva, loose shit, and
nasal crust, mixed with selflessness, adoration and unconditional
love). In the end, I knew I’d be selling
myself and my full potential as a human being short if I didn’t hold my nose
(literally) and take the leap into the deep end of uncertainty we’ll call impending
parenthood.
It's unbelievable and frankly weird to think that in just a few weeks, I'll have a creature I'll need to (jointly, with my wife) nurture, change, help teach, and generally raise. For all my past achievements, I have never really felt I was qualified for this thing, parenthood. Some people just fall into it naturally, it looks like from the outside, but I can't do that. After all, my achievements so far have been intellectual, financial, logical. They haven't been emotional, and emotional strength is (ahem) not my strength.
I always assumed parenthood was designed for someone older, someone more balanced, somehow more equipped to handle the randomness and chaos which must certainly accompany having a helpless, small child. In my mind, I'm still about 23 years old, which is great when I need to go for a run, drive somewhere quickly, or be creative at work. It's terrible, though, when it comes to facing the reality that I'm no longer 23 years old, and I haven't been 23 for quite a while, in fact.
***
Uncertainty is not my thing.
I keep spreadsheets on minutia, I follow bloggers who write about Bayesian
statistical applications, and I work in an research field because I
seek to minimize uncertainty in every way possible. As an extreme example, if I could know the precise moment I am
supposed to die, I’d want to know it.
But I can’t know it – I can only know that I one day will die, and
embracing my own mortality is a key aspect in embracing parenthood. Some little part of me could, perhaps should, live on, long
after I am gone. Maybe that's a little selfish, but it's ultimately a part of the calculus that led me to decide to become a parent in the first place. I admit this without any shame.
That said, one of the things that freaks me out is that there is virtually nothing I (or any parent) can
do to keep our future child from the (albeit unlikely) outcomes of having
autism or schizophrenia, or from being a serial killer or a sociopath. This is the unfortunate, perhaps less talked-about side of
becoming a parent – perhaps only something really negative people ever think
about, but that’s sort of what I am. But it really does happen to people.
To that point, worry is my thing. I worry about everything, including highly
unlikely outcomes such as the ones mentioned in the previous paragraph. It helps to remember that for someone who tends toward nervousness
like me, it’s all too easy to spend your life hopping from one anxiety point to
the next, and then one day your kid is twelve and a half years old and you’ve
spent the last thirteen years worrying about nothing of substance. It’s more difficult, but ultimately more
rewarding, to just jump into the uncertainty and allow oneself to accept
whatever happens next.
***
So I suppose I'll just trudge through the next few weeks, until the "best day of my life" happens. But the odd thing about the best day of your life being something like four weeks away is it leads someone toward some oddball type of emotional performance anxiety - what if it's actually NOT the best day of my life? What if, for some reason, my wedding day, or the day I moved into my house, or the day of my college graduation, trumps it?
At this point, and to conclude mercifully, I'm looking at what I've written above and it looks half like the writing of a very anxious individual and half like the scribblings of a madman. I'm still going to publish it, though, because (a) YOLO, and (b) it might be worthwhile for someone in a similar position to read this and realize they're not nuts, they're only temporarily nuts. Perhaps some of you who've been in this position before empathize. But still, these are just my thoughts.
