Sunshine & Moonbeams

It’s the hardest time.

Almost four years ago my wife and I had our first kid. A boy. He’s beautiful and amazing and phenomenal. A year and a half ago we had a second son. He too is a miracle and an incredibly joyful addition to our lives. We are grateful, thankful, and better off for having kids.

Taken together, they’re a fucking massive amount of work. And very often they’re an enormous, incalculable, anxiety-inducing, blood-pressure raising pain in the ass. We also managed to get a very, VERY difficult first child, and a second that has slept more or less like balls for a year and a half, which has made the past collectively 5.5 years (and now, and now, and also right now) a sleepless, stress-ridden, early age-inducing debacle.

After loss of sleep, stress, depression, anxiety, anger, sadness, and almost every other human emotion (including joy, yes), I wanted to document our experience not only for our (lacking and worsening) memory, but in the hopes it might—in contrast to most baby books on the market— actually be mildly useful to new parents or people thinking about being parents or people who wished they were parents with some dream of what it’s like but really have no fucking clue what it actually entails.

I’ll reiterate that the madness that ensues (here and in every post, thought, moment, etc) encapsulates the toddler and infant era—at least in my family. I don’t know yet about what comes next. Things might get better tomorrow. They might stay the same. My youngest still has to go through the hellish nightmare of a toddler year we’re still in with my oldest. So there’s that. And friends with slightly older kids don’t seem to complain that much. So they’re either lying (which is pretty much the bar), or it does actually improve. On paper I can say I’m confident EVENTUALLY things will improve. In how long? At what age(s)? I don’t know. But these past years have been a trial. A test. They’re not all goo goo ga ga. Get ready.

Good marketing

Parenting is not what they tell you in books. There may be no bigger marketing success than the parenting media segment. This most genuinely vulnerable and needy swath of people - new parents (in particular Mothers) - has the largest amount of utter bullshit fed to it from all sides of the media and e-commerce spectrum: books, blogs, products, foods, clothes, furniture, toys, classes, courses, social media groups—it’s all just sunshine and moonbeams and my dearest baby boy this, my darling girl that. The range of books on babies and becoming a parent is staggering. There are the medical ones, there are the philosophical ones, there are the picture ones, there are the what-the-Europeans-do ones, what the hippies do ones, the ones about music and the womb, books from hospitals, books from Moms, books from Dads, books from psychiatrists, from sleep consultants, from non-parents, etc., etc., etc. Not to mention books on feeding, on behaviour, on how to make them geniuses. And then there’s the parenting books for parents like financial planning for single moms, rich parent poor parent, and a host of others.

While I haven’t come close to reading them all, and while I’m also sure some are useful (if you have time to, you know, sink into an entire book while pregnant and/or working in the hopes that it’ll be the ONE book that does something for you, and you actually, you know, remember anything it says in a, you know, actual, practical moment of need), most of the books fall short. In many to most cases, the books are not in fact useful. They can actually be counter productive. You invest precious time into reading them, assuming, expecting, hoping you’re internalizing some useful information. Information you’ll, you know, use when your baby comes out. And if you’re like us, you bought a LOT of books. So many books there’s no way any human would have the time to read them (unless we started in advance of being pregnant). And because there were so many, we couldn’t even really know which one to focus on. Some have tidbits of useable stuff. But where we did find use, with ALL of them, was as a coaster. Or placemat. Or TV remote holder. Or paper weight. Or decoration on shelves. Perhaps THE most useful application of baby books is when kids are sick: if you stack them up together, they’re great for propping up a crib at one end when your kid has a cold or runny nose.

But when you have a real kid problem, the books don’t do much. Especially if it’s a problem you’ve tried some stuff for. I could not find more than a single worthwhile article, not to mention book (after days of internet searching) for example on what to do if your kid hates the car. And I don’t mean just the standard “my kid hates the car” my kid hates the car. I mean really, really, really, like can’t even go in the car type my kid hates the car. And I don’t mean the useless posts (most likely ghost written by millennials in their one-bedroom condos) talking about seat strap tightness and “have you tried car toys and singing songs together?” I mean like when your child wails—screams—non-stop for the duration of every car ride. Every care ride. Seriously. As soon as the car goes into drive. And until it comes back into park (which for us often literally meant pulling out of the driveway, and pulling right back in).

As a parent now for 4 collective years, I can say honestly that I have never been so tired. I have aged greatly in a short time. I have not slept well since our first child. I have higher blood pressure than I ever did before. I get emotionally broken and overwhelmed easily. I don’t see friends (though often of my own doing, but usually based on fatigue and opportunity-cost i.e. sleep vs. putting on pants). I don’t really care to make plans aside from getting out of town with my family when possible. I don’t care to do much aside from try to recoup mild amounts of energy between child-related events. General inspiration is low. We look forward most to the two or so hours of the evening after our children are in bed. At which point we mostly stare at the TV with mouths agape. And larger life goals and motivations are not really possible to think about given points A through J.

But this ladies and gentlemen, is what it means to have kids.

No one really tells you what it’s like. Comedians try. Books try. Movies try. But not anyone who actually knows. Or no one who actually knows and is willing to tell you the truth. And when I say no one, I mean like people who actually have kids. I mean like even your friends who have kids. They just don’t tell you. In part because they’re too tired. In part because they can’t remember what happened yesterday much less a month ago. In part because they don’t want to talk about it. In part because it uses up too much precious player-health-energy to get into the details when those details are the only thing they live, day in, day out. In part because talking about the realities would take so long and make them out to be so depressed and depressing that no one would want to stay to hear it. And in part because they don’t want anyone to know they had (or are actively having) a difficult time and want it to sound like everything is awesome. If people who have kids and know what it’s like actually tell you anything, it’s funny fun stuff. Or funny fun hard stuff. Or funny fun shitty stuff. But always funny. And fun. It has to be a bit. A “story”. Something to talk about with strangers. Another 2 minutes to add to your tight five. Oh my kid’s throwing another lying down screaming crying screaming kicking screaming shitting screaming hitting screaming tantrum: haha, how funny. Those kids.

The backyard BBQ

Case in point. I was at a backyard bbq the other day. All the families from the street came. So like 7 families. But still. All but one couple had two kids. So that’s 6 x 2 + 1. 13 kids. Now you’d think this would be the place where parents talked about their hardships. If there’s a place to let loose, to let your emotional hair down, to talk to other parents about parenting, it’s a goddamn bbq. The behaviour, the sleep, the sickness, the feeding, the fatigue, the cost, the memory loss, the weight loss, the depression. The din should have been heard three blocks over. But it wasn’t. We should have talked about common experience. But we didn’t. People should have confided in one another, shared stories, supported one another. But it wasn’t. Most of us were actually chasing our kids around. So there’s that.

The closest it came for me was when a Mom I didn’t know asked what time my youngest goes to bed. As he was approaching full fission reaction around my ankles after a full day at daycare in the hot sun with likely his first sunburn of the season and wild with hunger and fatigue, I said, “now”. Which was almost 6pm. I followed up saying, we start the routine around now, which ends up usually being 30mins to an hour. There was the empathetic nodding and eye rolling and hunched shoulders and sighs and “I’ve been there”’s and “Yaaaa”s. But she didn’t respond so much as just mutter something that sounded a lot like: “Ahhh ya, we don’t talk about that”. Like, it’s too painful to talk about. Or let’s not go there.

Which seemed funny but oddly appropriate. I didn’t need to get into the difficulty of it with her. It wouldn’t help me in that moment to have someone I didn’t know empathizing. And much as she might want to know more, she doesn’t need to hear yet another stress story of putting kids down for bed. Parents do it every motherfucking night. Do I need to hear YOUR particular issues with it? On TOP of mine? Likewise does it really help me to vent my private toil to someone who’s name I still don’t actually know? Will I feel supported? Will her sympathetic, angle-headed nodding give me the peace and rest I need? Nope.

But there’s the rub. The people with intimate, hard-won knowledge of one of the most difficult activities in the pantheon of human experience—the best test group for data collection, the most ideal gathering of same experienced people in one place—don’t want to talk about it. Like, “It’s a bbq. Let’s just sip our fucking bubly, chase after our kids playing on this totally not-to-code play structure and eat these Costco burgers, ok?”.

And that’s where it hit me, you know, again, or maybe just more brutally: the super difficult experience I’ve had for the past 4 years is almost guaranteed to be shared in some way, by at least one other parent in whose company I was then standing. Could I confide in them? Fuck no, I just met them for Chrissakes. You can’t just jump straight into your problems. Even if you both have kids. You don’t know each other. Sharing kid stuff is kind of universal with people you don’t know, but only to a degree. Again, like just the funny stuff. Or the funny brutal stuff. Or the funny not sleeping stuff. Like “how funny, those kids”.

And that’s pretty much the chestnut of it. Why no one talks about their experience parenting…with other parents. Other parents who also have difficulty. Even if their kids are less difficult. It’s still difficult. But no one else who knows it’s difficult, and shares your difficulty, and knows you are having a difficult time, as they are, makes it any less difficult for you, in your difficulty.

Near the end, I went to talk to the host who was barbecuing. He has two kids. His partner does a lot, which I know from “neighbourhood visibility”. But still. I thanked him/them profusely. I said man, this is above and beyond. Thank you. He shrugged, “Ah, you know, it’s just a little thing”. I said “No man. It’s NOT a little thing. It’s a big thing. You’re barbecuing burgers, hot dogs, buns, have condiments, multiple salads with shaved nuts, fizzy drinks, melon-balled fruit plates, and questionable homemade cookies. For 10+ people. This is not little. It’s big. I cannot, and do not, want to do this myself”. Of course it’s polite and part of a host’s job to just say “Hey, you’re welcome” and not get all emotional like I did. But still. Another example of people with multiple kids, doing hard work, not hinting at the underlying challenges.