“I’m so excited for you guys” — Trepidations of a soon to be parent
People are excited for us to have a child.
Are we excited? It depends on how you define excited I suppose. If we stick to the dictionary definition, “stirred emotionally; agitated”, then yes, I guess we are excited.
Are we excited as in “I’m not happy and fulfilled until x event happens”? Absolutely, unequivocally, no.
We’re comfortable — perhaps a little too comfortable. When we tell people that we’re incredibly nervous about parenthood, the response is typically reassurance that we’re going to be fine parents. While that is appreciated, it’s really not the central reason for our trepidation. After a lot of thought, here’s what I think it is:
We’re just not sure we’re going to be happy.
We were never desperate for offspring. To be fair, we haven’t necessarily been opposed to it either, which is why we’ve been going without birth control for a few years. I have to admit though that I gave an inward sigh of relief every month when we found out we weren’t pregnant. Based on everything I’ve ever heard (I do run in religious circles), that’s not really normal, or even ok to say.
We were at a birthing class and at the beginning we were supposed to ask our neighbors sitting next to us questions about themselves so we could introduce them to the class. The couple we spoke to seemed nice enough. When we asked them what their biggest fear was with having children was, the wife said she was terrified of going through labor, and the husband piped up right away and said, “but we’re soooo excited”. Internally I gave the biggest eye roll the world has ever seen.
I often wonder to what degree people use their intellectual capacities to make by the far THE biggest decision they’re ever going to make in their entire life. Of those parents who purposefully decided to have children, what percentage of the decision was made of up cold and calculation, and how much was pure emotion?
When I run the calculations in my head and factor in all that goes into having children, the math just doesn’t add up. I have to assume there’s a certain level of emotional detachment from reality needed in order to make such a permanent, utterly life-changing decision, without having much of an idea what it’s even going to be like.
I’d like to understand why people have children. Maybe the answer is just biology. We’re driven to continue our species and so we feel the urge to have offspring.
Maybe people like the idea of being in charge of someone and teaching them all they know, and how to go about life the ‘correct’ way.
Could it be a lack of pursuits? From my experience, doing is one of the keys to living a fulfilled life. Having kids seems like a built-in way to do things, even if that means cleaning up a lovely assortment of bodily fluids, feeding, then going back to cleaning up more bodily fluids — all with little to no sleep.
Emily and I didn’t just magically wake up with programming jobs and graph/web design jobs. We do things in our free time, and people eventually pay us for it. Constantly learning has the happy effect of fulfillment — and also possibly leads to a decrease in our desire to have children because we’re already doing and growing.
Knowing that children are a major time investment, is my career going to stagnate due to lack of time to learn and practice new skills? This represents a very real worry.
Is it that extroverts just need people to talk to all the frickin’ time? We’re weird hermit introverts who don’t like to be disturbed. Yeah, kids are totally going to ruin that.
Do people have kids because they’re not satisfied with their marriage? I hope not. At any rate, our marriage is doing pretty well (at least our pre-children marriage is). I can’t shake the thought that maybe the Universe or God or whatever thinks we have it too good. Kids are a tornado of poop and barf that could pop our bubble of naivety about life, and confront the fact that it’s a struggle for most people, and we have no business getting off so easy.
Do people have kids because their religion tells them to and they’re shamed into it? Probably not. Either way, we’re not going to be shamed into doing anything, thank you very much.
For all I know, everyone is too scared to admit they’re just as unsure as we are. People not being genuine in public? I’m sure it’s been known to happen once or twice.
Despite the fact that it makes little to no logical sense, here we are about to throw our hat in the ring, waiting to inevitably get our ass kicked. Apparently that also means having people get excited for us.
Emily and I have talked a lot about why we’re doing something that seems so stupid. I’m not sure I have the entire answer yet, but a part of it is how empty we imagine feeling when we’re 50. Living comfortably, having all the money we could ever want, having avoided doing difficult things such as the trials of parenthood, and passing up one of the biggest opportunities of growth we’ll ever have.
Emily and I have constructed a family mission statement, which we’ll continue to review and revise every year as a family. One of the sentences in that statement is “We value and even pursue difficult experiences because they are the means to wisdom”. The main reason to avoid parenthood is to avoid the struggle, and that doesn’t jive with our mission statement.
Even though intellectually, we have our reasons, it’s sometimes very difficult to imagine that it’s never going to have just the two of us again, at least for a long time. There’s been an undercurrent of melancholy in everything we do, as we try and savor these last few weeks. When we get a good night’s rest, when we put on a record at full volume, when we jump in the car and get ice cream on a whim, it’s sad that those things are probably going away for a long time.
But we believe that there is something greater in store for us, even though we have no evidence. I guess that’s what they call Faith.
We’re sooo excited.
