On Being a Dad

A personal reflection on fatherhood

Photo by Justin on Unsplash

1. Loving strangers

One month after my first daughter was born, a younger friend from work asked me to explain what parenthood was like.

I can’t do that, I said. Wisely, she appealed to my vanity, reminding me that my professional identity was based on explaining complicated ideas, and so wouldn’t it be a little sad actually, a little bit pathetic even, if I couldn’t explain something as basic as fatherhood? I took the bait.

People tend to explain parenthood by comparing it to other real-life experiences, I said. But parenthood isn’t conceptually combinatorial in a way that benefits from that exercise. You can’t multiply I have a puppy with My 2-year-old nephew pooped on me once and it was funny to arrive at the experience of parenthood.

“Have you been to Paris?” I asked. She had not. Paris is my favorite city, I said. You might tell me that you’ve practically been to Paris, because you’ve been to London and Montreal, and what more could the city of Paris offer beyond some blend of Major European Capital and City That Speaks French And Serves Buttery Sauces? But those travel experiences aren’t additive in a way that captures the experience of being in Paris. So, in this narrow respect, I said, parenting is like Paris.

But, much more to the point, parenting is nothing like Paris. Imagine that every day you wake up in your left-bank apartment, and the city has meaningfully morphed into some magically strange variant of Paris. On Tuesday, the streets and boulevards no longer meet at their old familiar intersections. On Wednesday, the Louvre moves to another arrondissement. The Arc de Triumphe turns upside-down on Thursday and floats in the sky on Friday. Now we’re talking. Now that is more like parenting. To be a parent is to be a permanent tourist in a constantly evolving foreign city, which also happens to be your home.

The baby you bring home from the hospital is not the baby you rock to sleep at two weeks, and the baby at three months is a complete stranger to both. In a phenomenological sense, parenting a newborn is not at all like parenting “a” singular newborn, but rather like parenting hundreds of babies, each one replacing the previous week’s child, yet retaining her basic facial structure. “Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger,” Andrew Solomon wrote in Far From the Tree. Almost. Parenthood catapults us into a permanent relationship with strangers, plural to the extreme.

When you become a parent, you meet your child. And then you meet your child again. And again, every day after that. You will never stop meeting your child. That is one reason to become a parent: To have a child is to fall in love with a thousand beautiful strangers.

2. Ride the rides

One thing they don’t tell you about parenthood is that your daughter might turn you into a monster. It’s 8am, and the coffee is getting cold, and you find yourself stalking around the kitchen island table, fingers curled into claws, lower jaw extended, teeth bared, foot stomps heavy, voice roaring and phlegmy, an ogre hunting prey, and your two-year old daughter is squealing as she tries to escape. You catch her by the leg, swing her into the air, fling her upside down, pretend to gnaw at her tummy. You set her down and let her do the thing where she sort of pretends to run away without running away. “More! More!” she demands, but the “r”s are soft, and it sounds more like “Mo’ah! Mo’ah!’” The response is automatic: The prey requests, the ogre obeys. The face of the father melts away. The face of the monster reappears.

My daughter and I have played this game approximately one thousand times. Nothing in my life could have anticipated this hunter-prey pageantry or the joy I get from it. I’m not a monster guy, generally speaking. Friends who had kids before me never once pulled me aside to whisper, “oh, another thing, you will have to pretend to be a monster all the time.” But I’m struck by the sense that I was born to play this game just as she was born to play it.

Parenthood is everything you’ve heard: confusion, panic, joy, sadness, anxiety, boredom, and anxiety again. Beneath these passing moods is a deeper feeling for which there is no good word. It is the feeling of suddenly finding yourself playing the oldest game in the world, a game you know that billions of people have played before you. There is nothing about being a parent that isn’t a cliché. This is a terrible inconvenience for the suckers out there who try to write essays about it. But I also find this to be an existential balm: I was built for this, and it was built for me.

One way to think about life is that you are locked inside an amusement park. The park has no clear purpose. It’s just there, and so are you. You ride the rides, and then it’s lights out. Falling in love is a ride, and making deep friendships is a ride, and sex is a ride, because these are all experiences that were built for us to do. And then, stretching over the park, there is a twisty and vertiginous rollercoaster called “having a child.” Parenthood is not special. It’s just another ride in the park. But it is there, and it was built for us, and we were built for it, too.

So, that is a second reason to become a parent. You’re in this amusement park only once, and I think you might as well ride the rides.

3. Another way

“There is no such thing as a baby,” the psychologist D. W. Winnicott once said. “If you set out to describe a baby, you will find you are describing a baby and someone”—such as a parent, a nanny, or an older sibling. “A baby cannot exist alone but is essentially part of a relationship.”

I have always loved that line: “There is no such thing as a baby.” But surely, its logic extends to adults, too. If you set out to describe a person, you do not begin by listing all the things they do alone, when no one is looking. You describe what that person is like in relation to you, or to someone you know. “Is Derek a good friend?” is a question for my friends. “Is Derek a good brother?” is a question for my sister. “Is Derek a turgid writer?” is a question for my readers. A psychologist such as Winnicott might be tempted to articulate this principle with an existential flair: There is no such thing as an individual. But I think the down-to-earth version feels more true: Every individual is the sum of their relationships.

There is another line I love from the book & Sons by David Gilbert. Two men walk into a pub and see their mother: “The brothers straightened, reshaped as sons.” How true, how strange. It is an awkward pleasure to see an old friend around his parents. Some softening or hardening in their face, some slouching or straightening in their back. The presence of a parent remakes a child, transforms them back into a child.

My mom and dad died three years apart of two cancers in my late-20s. When I met my wife, both of her parents had already passed away, too. Beyond the obvious tragedy of our situation, there is a subtler cost that Gilbert and Winnicott would appreciate. No matter how well my wife and I know each other, I will never know my wife as a daughter, and she will never know me as a son. We will never see each other “straightened, reshaped” in the presence of our parents.

There is a sad place to take this: I was a slightly different person with my mom, and my wife will never know that me; my wife was a special person with her mom, and I will never know that her. But now we are parents. My wife, who will never know me as a son, will always know me as a father. And I, who will never know my wife as a daughter, will always know her as a mom. There is the third reason to become a parent: It gives the people you love another way to know you.