Becoming a parent made me a better person
Becoming a parent made me a better person
A reply to the "regretful parent" genre
It’s funny how much we humans can change in just a few years. Father’s Day is already receding in the rearview mirror, and yet I’d never have guessed that getting a scribbled card could be a serious highlight of my week.
Although, looking back, I’ve realized I was trending toward boredom with life prior to kids. Bars started to look the same. Clubs became overly-packed, obtrusive, annoying. Eating out at restaurants blurred together. So many of the same menu items, the same delectable delights; yet even a delight becomes worn over time. Not everyone feels this, I’m sure. But in hindsight, in ways I couldn’t recognize at the time, I absolutely did.
I’m sympathetic to the reply that I wasn’t trying hard enough. You could have gone to Paris! I imagine someone saying. You could have done drugs at Burning Man! Heck, any day of the week you could have gone out and bought a new expensive scotch. New music was going to be released, new books, new movies, and new games. The actual news itself will always keep rolling. There’ll be another beautiful sunset, when the red gold light comes in through the trees from the west.
Yet to this I’d reply: Ah, but I had seen beautiful sunsets. I had tasted many scotches. I had done drugs at Burning Man. I had sat at a restaurant in Paris and watched the Seine sparkle as I read Hemingway and smoked a cloying cigarette. I could return to the city, but it would be grayer than the first time, for I would not be a young man in my twenties. Paris would be the same, but I would have changed. Over time the world ceased to surprise me. I saw its machinations, and became increasingly unimpressed. I saw my own machinations, and became equally unimpressed. I watched the talking heads on TV repeat themselves. All the human race began to look like a pack of bickering primates. One side wins. Then the other side wins. I’d turn the TV off and it’d be 9PM on a Wednesday. I could go read another novel, but I’d already read a thousand. What was the 1001st novel going to give me that I didn’t get from all the rest?
I thought becoming jaded was a natural part of growing up. Instead, becoming un-jaded is what happened when I finally did grow up, and it has radically improved my quality of life. It’s a revivification I think many parents experience (and is only sometimes expressed).
I write this, flirting with sappiness, because it’s become surprisingly easy to find prominent examples of parents arguing the exact opposite: that children have fundamentally worsened their lives. At least in that the “I regret becoming a parent, actually” genre of essay has become popular in high-profile outlets. Examples over the last few years include publications in Buzzfeed, The Atlantic, TIME magazine, Business Insider, Newsweek, The Independent, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Guardian, etc. Many of the pieces in the genre have gone viral. E.g., the TIME piece from this year, “The Parents Who Regret Having Children” was shared to the tune of millions of views and included parents describing their new identities as “domestic gulag.”
