February 25, 2025

On parenting, work, and taking walks in winter

I’m not on social media much these days other than posting Rohan’s latest train track design, so I miss things like a guest essay in the NYT by a father who explores the idea of regretting having a kid and also, a bit cartoonishly, getting bored with playing with his daughter. Fortunately, I have Deez Links to alert me to the latest media mishaps. I’m sure this essay has been ridiculed and dogpiled by people cleverer than me. But a couple things in the essay brought up something that isn’t just funny, rather a widespread cultural misunderstanding about what it means to be a parent. Something that feels measurably wrong rather than a difference in values. The writer says:

We are supposed to love it, to think it is the most wonderful thing we have ever experienced. We are told we will become better people as a consequence of being parents.

Later he also says:

… despite my love for Olivia I don’t really enjoy playing with her. I mean, I can play for 10, 15, 20 minutes, but after that I get bored and frustrated that I am wasting time, and that my to-do list is just growing.

Humor me as I tell you a tale. As a preteen, I began helping my dad take out the trash. I did this for a stupid reason, which I would like to try and describe precisely. I didn’t actually want to waste precious evening minutes on taking the trash out after doing homework. I don’t think I had a sense of saving my dad a few minutes in a friendly, oh-let-me-help-you-with-that kind of way. Instead I thought that in participating in the chore of trash, I would gain the sense of being a better, more saintly person.

To my surprise, when I spent time dumping the smaller trash cans into the bigger kitchen trash bag, bringing that outside, and rolling the bin to the curb, I felt nothing. I did not feel whatever I expected to feel, re: being a better person. I did not perceive that, and concluded (really!) that it wasn’t working for me.

Fortunately, I didn’t give up on helping out with the trash now and then, because if nothing else I have a habit-forming personality. And while participating by rote in the trash ritual and feeling nothing, I began to notice other things. Taking out the trash gave me 2-4 minutes of outside time that I wouldn’t otherwise have. That my dad appreciated me taking part, even if it was still mostly him doing the work.

So, I continued to not feel like a saint, but learned to like taking out the trash for other reasons. This is of course because taking the trash out is not a big deal, no great rewards are at stake, and is just something that has to get done. But 20ish years later, it is also a spiritual ritual for me, checking the pulse of the outside world for a few minutes on a weeknight when I would otherwise have spent the whole night indoors. In the fall, I listen for flocks of snow geese overhead. In the winter, the smell of cold and snow. In the spring, the chirps of migratory birds overhead. In the summer, the katydid chorus.

Alright, get to the point, huh? Why am I talking about taking the trash out in responding to an essay about parenting, isn’t that kind of crass? Well, because I think this essay writer is waiting for the same feeling that preteen-me was. The conveyance of sainthood. God himself descending and saying, “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.” My fact-check is that it just doesn’t work that way, not for chores and definitely not for parenting. We could do a whole number here regarding gendered expectations about chores and parenting, too, but I think you could work that one out in your heads by now.

In talking to people considering being parents, I describe parenting partly as a way to spend your time. You will spend time painstakingly feeding a baby, carefully wiping a bottom, maybe scrubbing out bottles and breast-pumping gear, walking a fussy baby around the block. Maybe some things that are much more inconvenient and difficult than that. There are (of course! of course!) emergent properties to doing all these tasks. It’s not just tasks. But it is also a way to spend your time. It deserves to be thought about in the way that you make decisions about spending your time. And if you find that imagining spending your time in those ways largely doesn’t appeal, it might be a cue to ask some deeper questions about your reasons for embarking on the parenting adventure.

I think this is very closely connected to the way this writer talks about professional work, too:

… at 47, my life didn’t look like the one I had once envisioned for myself. To be clear, I have a lot to be proud of. I do work that I care about as a radio producer and reporter, and I’ve been fairly successful. But I didn’t set the world on fire.

Same thing! By his own evaluation, he is doing good and useful work well. “But I didn’t set the world on fire,” e.g., I have not won universal praise and admiration, the Lord Almighty has not appeared in the sky and congratulated me on my works. Same thing. Same thing.

Hey, in short, we’re two people who look really differently at what work is and how we expect to be rewarded for it. Maybe I just have smaller ambitions, which has its pros and its cons. We’re also at pretty different life stages, 32 vs. 47. So maybe the reckoning-up of accomplishment exerts more force at that age. But I just think again of the parable of taking out the goddamn trash and wonder if he’s thinking about this all wrong.

I’ll also be honest and say, yeah, I think every parent including me gets bored with playing the same little game over and over. That’s extremely normal. It only comes across as ridiculous and laughable in the context of the essay being overall misguided. It’s the point when the needle of our schmuck-o-meter hits the red zone. You don’t even like the fun part?? But here’s the thing: our reactions as parents to playing or anything else aren’t the point. It is ultimately not about us, or perhaps said better, it doesn’t need to be about us all the time. It still needs to get done, the playing or the diaper changing or the feeding. Let go of the burden of needing to feel happy and saintly about it 100% of the time, maybe? I think this writer does land there, in his own way, though he phrases it really differently than I would. (And to be quite honest, I know Rohan will be reading in a couple short years, so like I better stay sharp in how I write about him, right??)

In the brief time I did look at social media recently, I noticed some dads talking about what they do to occupy their time while up with a newborn at night. Some tried to give advice about productive/self-improvement things to do, like having an e-reader so you can read with one hand while holding the baby. And that’s great or whatever. But my suggestion would be: don’t lose sight of the mission. Holding the baby is what you are there to do. If you are doing that, whatever is in your head, you are not failing. You don’t need to improve yourself through literature or anything else if you don’t want. And in focusing on the task at hand, as mundane and unexciting as it is, you might notice other things. The sounds of the house at night. The irregular breathing of a newborn (though that can get a little alarming if you think about it too much.) What your mind runs to when you truly have nothing else to do but sit there. Maybe you just put on some music you haven’t listened to in a while.

There’s a track that I thought of as Rohan’s “theme song” when he was a newborn. It seems kind of unfair for me to get to pick his theme song, but that’s the kind of unfair thing you get to do for a while as the parent of a baby. He’ll get to choose soon enough (right now I think he’d pick “Hot Potato” by The Wiggles.) The track is “Calf Born in Winter” by Khruangbin. You might have heard it in The Holdovers when Hunham and Tully arrive on their trip to Boston. Rohan was a newborn in the cold months, and his first walks in the baby sling or stroller were all bundled up in heavy winter clothes. Sometimes he’d be fussy about something or other as we left and then settle in for a chilly nap. Other times he’d stay awake and look around. The eyes of newborns aren’t fully developed, so it’s hard to say what he made of our neighborhood in Providence at first. But it was clear that he was paying attention. That before long, he was tracking objects with his eyes and making little noises as he noticed things. I couldn’t believe how soon he started pointing at things, pointing at birds as they flew across the street. Watching him become aware of the outside world, developing a relationship with a landscape that I new so well, was endlessly fascinating. There was no need for a reward beyond doing the thing we were doing, taking the walk and noticing things together. Which, to me, is the point. Spending time.