Fatherhood - One Year In

Things I wish would stay the same.

It's getting better all the time. In my experience at least. What felt like a challenge early on (rocking her to sleep in my arms) is now a predictable set of actions. And with each week, and sometimes each day, new tricks appear. 

The need to say 'No!' creeps in, even if it seems she doesn't understand or care to at the moment. It feels like everything keeps changing. What calmed her down just a few days ago is no longer relevant, my favorite onesie stopped fitting her after only a week, and the cooked salmon she loved only yesterday is now smeared against the wall. 

There's no doubt things are going to keep changing, a lot. So it only makes sense that I focus on the things I'd like to keep the same. This is what this list is for.  As before (and before that), initially it's a reminder for myself. Yet I hope it might prove useful to someone else.

Still being told to wait, still waiting

Before I became a father, I had some parents tell me that "that is it", my life will soon be over. Then when everything was fine I was told that the first two months are a joy and soon it'll be hell. This pattern continued, and throughout this past year it seems that hell was always lurking. Miraculously, being a father continued being awesome. New challenges present themselves almost daily, but every week and every month are better than the previous ones.

The good news is that by constantly hearing false prophecies I feel much more optimistic of the future and my ability to deal with it. 

I'm still a firm believer that any information or opinions on parenthood should be perceived as nothing more than ammo. It's up to the parents to not feel threatened and ultimately decide what information to act on. So unlike so many other topics these days (politics especially), I relish any new opinions. At the very least they help me consider my own positions. 

Doing it our way

During my wife's pregnancy we decided we didn't want to know the gender of the baby (I explained why here). In retrospect that decision somewhat backfired. I wanted to not think about gender, as I felt it was meaningless. Yet somehow that decision made everyone around me obsess even more over gender, turning it into a guessing game, visualizing how a boy or a girl might be like. 

And now, just recently, our daughter's 1st birthday rolled in. For about a month before, many have asked me what we have planned. Will we throw a party? How big? Have we thought about a certain activity? Or theme? The more we thought about it the more it became clear to us that we barely would want to attend such an event, let alone throw one. After all, such an event would make our daughter just as happy as going to the supermarket with us (she loves Trader Joe's). We did both agree that we wanted to celebrate somehow, yet a small brunch with only a few close friends felt much more our style (our daughter was of course invited). Did we deprive her of her first birthday celebration? Some would surely say so. But the fact that we were mindful of our actions is more important to me, and I hope we'll continue to do so in the future. 

Acknowledging the long term aspects

Early on, I felt like the most important thing to get right was her sleeping. The way I saw it, the more she sleeps, the more we can sleep, the more energy we have to not only live our lives but actually spend (and enjoy) our time with her.

After about four months we started sleep training. We did our homework, chose the method that suited us, and went to work. And it was. Work. A lot of it. But it was so worth it. Once we got her to sleep through the night it truly felt like magic. Sleep training is a classic early example of a high-leverage long-term investment that would pay dividends. When you're sleep deprived, all you can think of is your desire to sleep. But having your baby sleep through the night doesn't just allow you to sleep. It also brings with it energy to go out, and makes it much easier (and guilt free) to leave your child with a babysitter. These benefits are hard to consider when you're not sleeping. 

Recently I started thinking about other long-term worthwhile investments I'd like to make. Completely by accident, I came across a wonderful blog post by Henrik Karlsson, titled "Childhoods of Exceptional People". In it, he starts with the obvious, stating that if we want to master something, we ought to study the highest achievements of that field. That if you want to improve your writing, then of course read and study great writers. But then he continues with a refreshing insight pointing how: 

"The default for a parent is rather to imitate their peers and outsource the big decisions to bureaucracies. But what would we learn if we studied the highest achievements?"

The article goes on to cover the childhoods of great men and women such as: Virginia Woolf, Lev Tolstoy, John von Neumann, Alan Turing, René Descartes, Johann Sebastian Bach, and a few others. The article points to several fascinating parallels one could draw between the parents of these children. What I found to be most insightful was that all those adults, early on, had high expectations of their children. “They assumed they had the capacity to understand complex topics, and therefore invited them into serious conversations and meaningful work, believing them capable of growing competent rapidly”.

That last line stuck with me. Here I was, spending all this time with my daughter, and was likely to spend A LOT more time with her. Wouldn't it make sense for me to find a way to involve her in what I found interesting? After all, it's not just me she's likely to spend time with moving forward, she'll also get to interact with many of my closest friends, all of which I actually find quite interesting and would love for her to be exposed to. And yes, in order to include her in the conversation some topic would have to be dumbed down. Quite the effort.  

This approach is of course not straightforward. It's not easy. It'll require work. But I find it no different from sleep training. In reality, getting this right would probably have even more long-term leverage than sleep training. Eventually, all kids end up sleeping, but in my experience most young kids end up almost completely excluded from adult conversations. 

Dumbing down a conversation so a 3 year-old could understand it is no mean feat. I can already hear some of you (especially the "just you wait" people) telling me how what I'm describing here is extreme and close to impossible. But then, I consider the upside. All those mornings, evenings, trips, car rides, dinners, flights, and casual Saturdays where I would not only get to enrich my daughter's life while bringing us together, but also forcing myself to think and engage with what's on my mind, challenging myself to be able to explain things in a simplified way, one that would not leave any room for obscure terms or fancy language. 

Staying serious

Serious does not mean avoiding fun. It does not mean forcing anyone to do something they don't feel like doing, or give up something they do love. Seriousness simply means being deliberate. It means thinking long-term, acknowledging what's to come, and being cognizant of what we want for our lives. It could definitely mean having a fairytale-themed 1st birthday with 50 other babies. It could actually mean anything you want. As long as that was what you wanted.