You're number two.

If you don’t have kids, this probably won’t be very profound, enlightening, or funny. There’s a chance it may not be any of those things even if you do have kids, but at least you’ll have a bit more of an insider’s understanding of it. This should make you at least feel like you’ve got access to an exclusive club where the doorman always lets you behind the velvet rope. Only behind that velvet rope is not the smell of expensive champagne and sweet perfumes, but loaded diapers, insurmountable worry, and sleep deprivation. 

You’re a parent and one thing is clear about having a child, of course one in which you plan on taking an active part in their upbringing: you’re no longer number one. This is true for mothers or fathers. And in some cases you might not even be number two, nobly putting your partner before you on the bronze medal platform of priorities. For a single parent, I can only imagine this could feel something like being on the bottom of a top ten list.

This isn’t something that’s realized overnight. It’s not realized the first time you tell your childless friends you can’t stay out until 2AM, or the first time you cancel dinner plans. It’s something you realize after a few situations of making decisions based on the little human(s) in your life. No one tells you this before you have the baby. If they do, it’s always after, and even then they’re likely sugar coating it. Your sleep schedule is about to be drastically compromised. 

You better figure out how to do things with the baby or prepare yourself to just not do them at all anymore. What was once a social life is about to plummet like Halloween decoration prices on November 1st. Forget going on vacation for a while unless you take the baby with you (in which case it won’t feel like an actual vacation), or unless you find a relative crazy enough to agree to care for the baby longer than an overnight. And if you do actually arrange this, forget about having a good time because you’ll likely be talking about the baby most of the time, or worrying that said relative is giving them fast food and an old booze on the gums remedy to get to sleep since the baby will panic that a strange person is putting them to bed. 

No, people don’t tell you these things beforehand because they want to laugh about all of this once the baby comes, like some sort of sick joke with a punchline you have to wait 9 months for. The punchline in this case is a figurative pie to the face. People don’t actually tell you these things because they would feel bad scaring the shit out of you when you’re already scaring the shit out of yourself. They figure, oh it will be better for them to figure this all out later. Similar logic can be said of teaching someone to swim by throwing them into the deep end of a pool without a life vest, since you know, that’s how they did it in the old days. 

Anyone with a child has been fortunate enough to experience this, unless they’re very wealthy and have a live-in nanny of some sort from day one. If that’s the case they’re probably not reading this, so forget these people. They’re not the real parents, the ones out there on the front lines every day, deep in the shit, both figuratively and literally.

The flip side of this comes some time after you’re finally in the swing of this parenting thing, or when you’re not only riding that bike without training wheels on, but you’re able to manage riding it downhill with no helmet or brakes during an ice storm. It might be the first time you get them to smile, or laugh, or soothe them through a crying fit. You can actually feel like your purpose as a parent is something more than changing dirty diapers, making bottles, and being more responsible for this little human than you were for the last 7 houseplants you killed.

In those brief moments the struggle, sleepless nights, worry, and mental anguish all go away and you realize why all those parents you know, young and old, talked up this whole thing before the baby was here. 20 of the stressful situations that arrive with being a parent can be forgotten with one smile, or laugh, or one look at that kid when they’ve fallen asleep on you and your arm is asleep right along with them. You start to forget what life was like before this, though in reality you’re not forgetting

, it’s really the thinking that you can’t imagine life without it, and you wouldn’t change that for anything in the world. 

Listening to: Harry Nilsson, "Jump Into the Fire"

#newparent #parenting #dadblog