Happiness in parenthood
I’ll be honest: for the first five or so years, I thought parenthood basically sucked. Worse than that, I feared it was a fundamental mismatch with my brain chemistry, and that I’d made a big mistake having kids. I mourned the loss of my old life.
To be fair, the pandemic was a large part of my parental story. My kids were 3 and 5 when it hit, and oh my god did that suck. Schools and daycares closed. Parks and playgrounds closed. My wife and I were trying to work full time and also parent full time while being cooped up in our house with no end in sight. This epic responsibility of parenthood, which was already a dark struggle for me, had become a waking nightmare. I was miserable.
In my desperate search for commiseration on the internet, I found a sliver of hope. I think it was a Reddit post. A dad out there said he was pretty unhappy as a parent until his kid turned five, and then he started enjoying it.
Okay, I thought. Maybe that could be my story too. Just grin and bear it.
It’s been five years since those early pandemic days, and I’m so happy to report a profoundly different state of mind. I genuinely enjoy my kids, their zany stories, their laughter, their endless soccer and basketball games. I’m excited to take them on vacations. I actually like the books I get to read to them (at the moment, Ender’s Game with my older son and The BFG with my daughter). I feel like we’re in this fleeting sweet spot between having little kids and having teenagers, and I’m trying to slow down and savor it.
It’s still hard, of course. One of my kids has some mental health struggles that exasperate us daily. I still salivate at the thought of an entire day to myself, with not even a whisper from these people I love.
But I’m no longer teetering on the edge of regret. I’m no longer wishing for things to be different. My life feels full of mostly good things. I feel lucky.