ADVENTURES IN PARENTING

I Swore to Never Become That Parent

Within two weeks of being one, my famous last words came back to haunt me (and everyone around me)

If there is one thing you can guarantee to garner a collective groan from an ever more polarized society, it is people talking about their kids. More specifically: people complain about how difficult their parenting journey — which they chose to embark on — has been while simultaneously humbly bragging about how much better their children are than anybody else’s. Before becoming a parent, I could not stand this. I swore to never become that parent.

A good friend of mine from Scotland — who also happens to be my barber — often tells me about the dads coming into his shop complaining about how little they slept the night before. After a ten-minute monologue from the dad about how sleep-deprived he is that almost puts my friend to sleep while holding a sharp object in his hand, he will sometimes mention that he too got very little sleep the night before.

Instead of asking why, the dad will routinely start laughing hysterically through his dad-bod belly and answer with something along the lines of “You don’t get to be tired. You don’t have kids yet.” In one fell swoop, the dad will have asserted his monopoly power over tiredness, thus reinforcing the notion that parental tiredness is worth more than empty-nester tiredness.

I always found such stories and the arrogance of the dads starring in them incredibly absurd and would shake my head in amazement as my barber told them to me. I swore to never become that type of dad.

And now, here I am, less than two weeks into parenting and I can say that I am experiencing a whole new level of tiredness. As someone who has had the same bedtime since he was thirteen, nighttimes with an infant have taken all my beliefs about sleep and stuffed them away into the diaper bin.

What I have come to learn is that, whereas if I was getting a bad night of sleep before, I could simply turn around restlessly without leaving my bed, that is now not an option. A parent who gets bad sleep is thrown directly into the line of fire. Action, action and more action. Your brain needs to be functioning from the first cry. It is full-on solution mode.

There is nothing quite like the tiredness of being jolted awake by a screaming baby two hours into your sleep and attempting to change their diaper in the dark so as not to bother them more than they need to be. All of this while said baby is still kicking and screaming with the impending threat of being peed on staring you right in the face. This happens a few times a night, and since the baby has no regard for what stage of the sleep cycle my wife or I are in, it can sometimes be quite difficult to fall back asleep immediately.

So, yes, I am gravitating towards the notion that my tiredness as a new parent is worth more than your tiredness as a non-parent. I have officially betrayed my barber, crossed the picket line and become a member of the ‘Parents Getting Bad Sleep Cartel’.

“I wonder if we will start being late to more things after we have a kid.” My wife pondered aloud while sitting on the couch a couple of weeks before giving birth.

“Nah. We’re more structured than most people and value being on time way too much for that to happen to us.”

“But most of our friends and family with kids are always late.”

“Yeah, but most of those people were already time-challenged before they had kids and now they just have an excuse.” I countered, before proceeding to list off five couples we knew who fit that narrative.

I have always had a pet peeve about people who are chronically late to things and I refuse to accept when they use their kids as an excuse. If I were from a different generation I would call this “a lack of old-school accountability.”

Oh, the pomposity!

Fast forward a few weeks and while I am writing this piece, we have been trying (our best, I promise), to leave the house for the past hour and a half. The sanctimonious, self-righteous pre-parenting version of myself would have concluded this was all down to bad time management and prioritization skills.

And yet, that was before our household count increased overnight by fifty percent. Our newest member cannot get themselves prepared to go out the door on their own, cannot ‘hold it in’ if they need to go to the toilet and sometimes just looks so peaceful in a deep sleep, that my wife and I look at each other, telepathically weigh the pros and cons, and decide not to pick him up and move him into his stroller.

What horrible parents that don’t instill discipline from the early stages! I can hear my old self judging us from the background as we struggle to get out of the house before noon, sometimes still not having managed to have breakfast ourselves.

We may never have been late to things before and we also are not now. The trick has been to just not commit to any set time. The twisted parent logic goes something like this: saying we will be somewhere at elevenish should be interpreted to mean we can arrive anytime between eleven-thirty and one o’clock without being considered late.

So I stand by my point. We are more structured than most people and value being on time way too much to be late. As new parents, our time is obviously more valuable than yours.

The pastime of most seasoned parents is to live vicariously through their kids. This never starts early enough. Parents sometimes humbly — and other times overtly — brag about when their child first walked or talked or pooped by herself as if it was all part of a grand master plan.

On so many occasions at dinner parties, I have wanted to grab friends firmly by the shoulders, shake them slightly and let them know — without any half-measures — that I could not care less about their kids’ latest exploits.

“We will never be those types of parents,” I have found myself telling my wife on our way home on multiple occasions.

For those of you who have read this far (probably only first-time parents), you will have guessed, correctly, that my perspective regarding this has changed in the past couple of weeks.

Just for the record, I still do not care about my friend’s kids. However, I have started to inadvertently compare my two-week-old to theirs.

“Wow. We are already getting up only two times a night for diaper change. So and so did not sleep for six months. Losers!”

“Look! He already opened his eyes on day three, their kid took nearly a week!”

“He’s so strong! He turned his neck forty-five degrees! Their kid could barely lift her arm!”

These assertions get exponentially more delusional as the effects of sleep deprivation and baby bubble isolation compound.

“He could probably already start walking now if he wanted to.”

“You see how he kicked while I was changing his diaper? His ankle was already locked. He will be a star footballer!”

“He’s not crying. He’s talking. It took their child one year to say Mama.”

I may not have yet had the chance to attend a dinner party and exaggeratedly brag about my kids’ incredibly average progression thus far, but, rest assured, I am writing a self-indulgent piece for the world to see online.

There is probably a special place in writer’s hell for anybody who publishes an article of more than one-thousand-three-hundred words about their parenting exploits. Just make sure the sidewalks there are wide enough, or else I will have no trouble shamelessly occupying most of it with my oversized stroller while condescendingly scowling at other parents’ sub-par child-rearing abilities.

My storytelling centers on long-form first-hand accounts with a focus on vivid depictions of the local culture through the people I meet along the way. I also work as a travel advisor tailoring travel adventures all over the world, more info here: https://www.foratravel.com/advisor/nicola-volpi and am host of the Lost In Postulation podcast: a podcast exploring the intersection of pop culture and the mundanity of daily life.