Lesson 2: It never ends.
TL;DR: The banality of low-demand parenting tasks is relentless, eternal, and forces a confrontation with the Abyss.
there is a curious paradox at the center of caring for a baby: because it is easy, it is hard.
nothing involving an infant (save some sort of life-threatening crisis) is hard. infants are simple machines. they need to eat. they need to sleep. and they need some modest amount of supervised activity, preferably in which they can hone whatever new skill it is they’ve developed (usually at 3am).
providing for these needs demands almost nothing of the average adult human:
you can feed your baby with one hand while listening to a podcast and sending out work emails on your phone1.
your child will sleep an almost alarming amount during the first year, in rolling 45min to 2hr windows. you are free, during this time, to do literally whatever you want.
supervised activity, such as it is, requires mostly that you sit/stand nearby, providing relevant verbal encouragement and physical boundaries2.
it is all supremely easy. even the most daunting new parent task - bathing the child - turns out to be fairly simple and can, as frequently noted by Dax Shepard and Kristen Bell, also largely be ignored. as i wrote in Lesson 1, you may even come to look forward to the quotidian, recurrent nature of these simple tasks, because they mean that your child is not in a (real or perceived) crisis.
we have literally evolved as a species to care for our children, and it shows. your hands are perfectly sized for picking up your child. the crook of your arm is perfectly situated to hold them. their alien cries become somehow strangely intelligible to you, giving you a sense of connection that floods your lizard brain with dopamine and oxytocin. it all just (mostly) works, and when it doesn’t, Big Parenting has a product and/or service for that. you’re good.
so why is parenting still so hard?
Reason 1: You’re on duty. Forever.
studies seeking to understand exercise motivation have shown that when we’re able to clearly envision the workout ending, our pain is lessened and our resolve is strengthened. this corresponds with Haruki Murakami’s notion of “just running to the next post”, and also with our own lived experience and shared language around working out.
“just one more rep". “just one more mile”. “just one more minute”.
until such time as you’ve had a child, almost everything in your life has largely been discrete in this way. things begin and end - both in a micro and macro sense. if you are having a really hard week at work, there’s some essential understanding that you will get a break. it will end. it may just be one evening to yourself. or a weekend. or that vacation in a few months. or perhaps when you find a new job. but it WILL come and it is knowledge and certainty of that terminal point that profoundly reduces our suffering. our resolve increases.
as a parent to a new child, you will realize that this is no longer the case. you are now, 24/7 and for the rest of your life, on duty.
there is no next post. there is always one more rep.
Reason 2: The Duty is at once easy and impossible.
being always on duty is the first part of the equation, but it is not the whole story; it is also the nature of that duty that makes parenting hard.
in anticipating having a child, in imagining why it will be hard, we think about all of the things that will be asked of us. i will be called to change diapers. to feed the child. we imagine that doing these things themselves will be hard.
they are not hard. as above, they are incredible easy.
so when those tasks turn out to be trivial but also unrelenting and essential to the child’s survival, it is a sort of strange thing. we have all of this energy but nowhere to put it. our lives have been utterly reshaped around the very basic and very easily met needs of this child, but should we fail to provide for them, the unthinkable would happen.
as a consequence, each moment in which the child needs something from us is a reminder of its potential fragility. we are trying to keep our child alive. in doing so, we directly confront the ephemeral nature of all things, and by proxy that we and our child too shall arise and pass.
this thought terrifies us, wounds us each time it emerges, doubles our resolve to be careful, to clean the bottle extra well, to make sure that the cribsheet is extra tight. and it exhausts us. the steady heartbeat of caring so much and having to confront that caring all the time is at once the core joy of parenting and its central burden.
so it is that we are always on the wall, always prepared, constantly being asked to do very simple tasks to forestall the inevitable. the simplicity of those tasks leaves plenty of room for contemplation and rumination. girded for glorious battle, we are instead faced with a life-long marathon of subtle, enervating reminders that everything we love is finite. and, so long as our child is alive, those reminders will continue to arise.
this is why parenting is hard.
Reason 3: Childcare helps, but not for the second part.
someone once said that having a child is basically like taking your heart out of your body and letting it walk around. this is basically the best analogy ever.
many of you are likely saying to yourself, “well, zerosumdad, what about when i have a nanny? or a night nurse? doesn’t this act as a sort of interregnum on the Long March?”.
very much yes. but also, in a much deeper way, absolutely NOT.
it does not matter how much child care you have. how much support you’ve got around you. when you are out on a date with your partner and you’ve got a baby sitter, you will still need the certainty that comes with checking on that child, even as you yearn for the sweet release of not needing to check.
example: i am currently abroad on a bachelor party with 15 other guys. ALL of these folks, without fail, are compelled, multiple times per day, to check on their children3. they get angry when their wives do not pick up the phone, because they want to see their kid, to feel that connection. this is the reality. they do not need to check. they are not just checking because they’re worried about angering their wives. they both want and need to.
so, in short, even if you are fortunate enough to offload some or all of the parenting tasks themselves, you will still feel the recurrent tug of existential concern that accompanies their completion. and you will be annoyed that the resources you’re expending to secure that childcare, because that childcare can’t ever remove the relentless burden of caring all the time.
this is why parenting is hard.
One more thing…
this post is, frankly, a bit loose.
these concepts are, by their nature, messy and challenging to cohere. they are also very personal. as stated in my first post, my goal here is to try to give you some insight into what you might experience as a parent. or to mirror and authenticate the experience you’re having.
i suspect that folks might be hesitant to share these things, because they worry that they’ll come across as totalizing or reductive, insensitive to the experiences of others. so yeah, it’s totally possible that, as a parent, you have not or will not experience any of the things i’ve written here. or anywhere else, for that matter.
but my hope is that sharing this sort of thing will help a few folks out there either feel better prepared for the journey ahead, or less alone on the journey today.
Always thoughtfully positioning the phone so as to avoid unnecessary child screentime!
Your child will try to hurt itself. A lot. You should probably stop that from happening.
Assuming, of course, that they have them.
Absolutely love this!