Random Thoughts in Mid-July

Karen and I are doing a thing on Mondays in which she brings Cecil (who is two months older than Lupe) over to our place, then I leave while she stays with the kids for half the day. When I get back, she takes off for the second half of the day.

So, right now, I am feeling like a reasonable facsimile of my former self; sitting at Café Abir, a hip coffee shop, with five others with laptops, two with what look like schoolwork of some kind, two with strewn newspapers laid out before them, and a couple of guys just chatting over coffee.

And what do I choose to do with this precious time? Well, communicate with you, of course. To try to organize and come to grips with the random thoughts and feelings that I don’t otherwise have the time and energy to organize and come to grips with. Of course, they mostly revolve around the conundrum of family life.

I realized something recently, or at least have come up with a jackass theory about why I am having such a hard time with being happy while on paternity leave. As I’ve said before, two aspects of that feeling are the discrepancy between the reality and the unrealistic, romanticized idea that I had of what it would be before having kids, and the shockingly extensive loss of freedom. Well, in addition to those, I will add a third, and it is this; the primary offsetting factor that makes having children worth it, that ameliorates that loss of freedom and the attendant drudgery of caring for the kids on a minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, day-by-day basis, is that having children gives a life meaning, shape. In one fell swoop, a parent becomes part of something larger than themselves in a much more substantial way than was ever imaginable before, engages in a shared enterprise to which we commit more wholeheartedly than to any other thing before, with an emotional depth that we didn’t feel capable of, or know existed before having children.

And here is where I come up against a twin set of problems. The joys of having children are that they give life meaning and that they produce unexplored emotional depths. Yet, I have been thinking, rigorously I hope, for many years about the creation and experiencing of meaning within my life, and so don’t feel as though having children has given my life a meaning that it didn’t possess. The shape of my life has substantially changed, and I now have more competing priorities, but I don’t feel that having children has made my life mean more to me than it did. The second problem is that I have extremely limited access to my emotions, and so having an emotional epiphany is necessarily of limited scope. I love my children just as most parents do, with more emotion than I’ve ever felt before, but that love has not opened up some previously veiled great expanse of emotional terrain all across the various aspects of my life. The love exists, but it hasn’t carried over into other emotional centers of life for me.

I do feel connected to Natasha and the kids in a way that is profound and abiding, which is no small thing. Much of that thought about meaning in life produced the conviction that the deepest meaning in life derives from shared, purposeful experience. The most pungent example of this is the bonds felt by soldiers to those they have gone to war with.

So to be a part of the ultimate shared, purposeful experience is, indeed, profound. The problem, though, is that the drudgery of daily life with two jobs and two small kids erodes that profundity insidiously. We are both always tired. The kids are astoundingly and incessantly needy. The apartment is always a mess, in some way or another. Our social life is nearly non-existent, and what does exist is a constant struggle to maintain. In short, life often feels like little but toil and struggle, with only one reward; the kids.

Which are, it goes without saying, are worth it, and deserve it. But, it means that all components of our happiness must be derived from the joy of being a parent, and for people as multifaceted as Natasha and I, that is not only extremely difficult, but downright unrealistic. I simply cannot sublimate all of my own personal feelings, dreams, desires, needs to the kids and be uncomplicatedly happy with it.

I guess what’s particularly hard to deal with is that I can’t help but thinking that many, if not most, parents must fall into this category as well, but it’s a perspective that simply doesn’t get expressed. It seems taboo to even suggest that the trade-offs may be much closer to not worth it than the prevailing wisdom might lead us to believe. There are the bitingly amusing accounts of parenthood such as Alternadad, but no matter how acerbic they get, there seems to be an unspoken understanding that having kids is the best thing that ever happened to them, and that no matter what shenanigans they get into, or difficulties they raise, it is always, always way more than worth it.

Not that I mean to complain, or to imply that I feel that having kids isn't worth it. Again, they are to me. I am just trying to work through why I don’t feel the way I thought I would, or the way that our culture expects us to, as a parent. I know that I am smack dab in the middle of the worst of it right now. Aside from health issues or multiples, we’re in just about a perfect storm for having two kids: One extremely headstrong and verbal daughter deep in the midst of the terrible twos, a newborn who can’t sleep by himself, a tiny basement apartment, a city where it hasn’t topped 62 degrees and the sun hasn’t broken through the fog for more than a couple of hours at a time for two weeks in the middle of July, and we have no family living in town.

I know that it will get better. Years from now, it will seem silly that I could have broached the subject at all. They will both be sleeping through the night. I won’t be Ruby’s primary focus of attention six days a week. She won’t be two forever. The running of a family will be easier, Natasha and I will have some semblance of our independent selves and lives back.

Shit, well, it looks like I've spent all of my allotted time on one random thought. Too bad. Rest assured, the other were equally deep, incisive, and meaningful. If it wasn't for the constant, incessant neediness of the kids, I'd have time to share them all with you. Oh well, the kids get everything, and all else in my life, including you, gets very little. Just be happy that it was too early to go to a movie, or you wouldn't have gotten even this...