Becoming a Parent Will Ruin Your Life
If you are on the fence about parenthood and think you could live a happy life without needing to procreate, my advice is unequivocal: stay the course because having children will ruin your life.
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Look, I wasn’t doing anything all that interesting before my kids were born. I spent my twenties drinking way too much, smoking, and quitting jobs. Writing poems, moving cities, and actively ignoring attempts to process past trauma. Basically trying not to kill myself while also slowly killing myself. Methods my subconscious focused on, in order of odds of likelihood, appear to be: alcohol poisoning [top choice, obviously], lung cancer [very slow and painful when compared to the first, but cigarettes are amazing], and, murder given my propensity for going home with perfect strangers to places I would never be able to pinpoint or probably even remember.
I wouldn’t have said this, of course, but the pattern of bad decisions does tend to make one wonder. Some real boring, middle-management level self-loathing. I was not creative with this pain at all; it was an approximately decade-long, D-movie level of dramatics and chaos. I will try to spare you as many details here and in any of my other writings, except to say that when I was 26, I was blackout drinking and showing up to work with bruises all over me that I had no idea how I had gotten (stair falling would be my guess) so often that one of my co-workers finally pulled me aside and said: “I just don’t want it to be that no one ever asked: are you in an abusive relationship?” “Only with myself, “ I said, and carried on with my day.
I promise there weren’t many people to line up and buy tickets to that shitshow.
I don’t mean that it ruins you in the way you probably think I mean it. Yeah, you are tired, broke, and stretched too thin. You will fight with your partner all the time. You will forget that you chose this. It’s more like becoming a parent ruins your ability to live without fear. And that will absolutely ruin your life.
When I finally sobered up, I was 27 and a receptionist, newly completing an MFA program which I can’t say I have particularly utilized. It took six more years to start in the field I currently work in, which is interesting and pays the bills but is not exactly my reason for being. I still write and paint, but anyway, my point is that I didn’t give up my dream job or make any huge sacrifice to become a parent. I would argue that becoming a parent has made me worlds more practical, focused, and driven because I have to be. If I could go back in time, I would always choose to have my children.
So I don’t mean that it ruins you in the way you probably think I mean it. Yeah, you are tired, and broke, and stretched too thin. You will fight with your partner all the time. You will forget that you chose this.
But maybe it’s more like becoming a parent ruins your ability to live without fear. And that, if you are anything like me, will ruin your life.
I am well acquainted with fear. I started getting panic attacks when I was 25 — like ER in the middle of the night because I thought I was dying (haha, I wasn’t). And over the next few years, I got so tired of being scared and anxious that I truly gave up worrying about it. Fuck it, I am going to die, and so is everyone I have ever met, and there’s nothing I can fucking do about it, so I am just not going to care anymore.
This strategy worked amazingly well. Until I had kids. And I didn’t even see it coming; that’s how stupid I was. Wholly unprepared for the all-encompassing, soul-crushing terror of trying to keep a human infant alive (and she brought a friend!)
If you are not a parent but want to approximate what it is like, close your eyes and think about your first real heartbreak. The absolute bliss of falling in love and the terror and grief when that person you thought you could not live without is no longer with you. That person gave your life meaning and purpose. Now multiply all those feelings, the love, fear, and grief times a thousand. And you probably still won’t be close. And I don’t mean this in a sanctimonious way. It is the cluelessness of all of us before becoming parents, and rather than those that remain childless missing the point of life or something, it is actually my shock and awe at the absolute audacity of so many of us that didn’t. That one parent, (hopefully in most circumstances at least), pre-kids, looked at the other and somehow the pair, rather than seeing that we are all essentially just clinging to each other over the abyss, somehow agreed on these three sentiments:
- We could do this!
- We should do this! and
- How hard can this really be?
When I am pissed at my kids, I have to remind myself that I am the parent. I have to give up my hand a hundred times a day. I had to learn to stop being passive-aggressive. To stop and admit when I am being an asshole. To admit that I don’t always know better than them what the best thing is for them. To listen to them when they wonder what is the meaning of all of this and that I, barely grasping the what, don’t have the answer to why. Why are humans such jerks to each other? To the planet? Why do we die? When will we die? Why does living means loss? Does being human only involve a lot of suffering? To tell them I don’t know the answers while also trying to convince them that the joys are worth it while they have zero life experience or control over their own lives to believe me.
Most days, I feel completely out of my depth, and yet I have to pretend I know what I am doing. I think you don’t become an adult until you realize that no one knows what they are doing. Every single one of us is just winging it, hoping to get through the day. And the fragility involved when these days are backdropped by kids who depend on you is heartbreaking.
I remember one of the first times feeling this acutely, the twins were three or four years old, and we were at a neighborhood block party or something, and one of them came running over to ask me if their tummy would be okay if they had ice cream. Just their sweeping, sweet vulnerability. This surreal wondering: how has it come to be that I have any people that think I am in the position to tell them what is safe, let alone two? It broke me because this little person looked up at me with so much trust, and in their eyes, I knew everything. And it broke me because I knew how painful it was going to be for all of us when they realize I don’t.
That is why parenting will ruin you.
You love them so much, but at the same time, they don’t belong to you. You are raising them to be their own person who, if you are successful, will leave you and build their own life. You can’t make them feel that fear or that grief, or you will fuck them up. You have to stand back with your heart in your throat and a smile on your face like this is all you have ever wanted because it is. And it isn’t. That sums up parenthood.
It is an exquisitely uncomfortable practice to only express love, concern, and curiosity to them and to do this without showing the hundreds of feelings you will probably feel behind those and all of the wisdom you might have gained from the failings of your own childhood. Like, don’t make your children your emotional support system. Don’t fight with your partner through your children. Don’t make them your confidants. Always put their safety first. Don’t make them feel guilty for needing things or that they will only be loved if they meet the standards. Don’t mock them or pit them against each other. Don’t guilt them into things or make them feel responsible for what they cannot control. Don’t hurt them, and don’t let other people hurt them. Believe them when they tell you someone has.
It’s not that they never see me sad, or anxious, or anything but happy. That would also fuck them up. But I have to remind myself a lot not to let them feel responsible for my well-being. And doing this while, in the background, the world is burning. War, climate change, pandemics, and school shootings. All of it. You have to keep calm and act like you can handle all of it, that life is manageable. That adult life isn’t terrifying. And you still have to go to work, call your parents, and fold your laundry.
If you aren’t a parent, I know you still have to do most of these things. But there probably isn’t that taken-by-hostage feeling of having to keep your eyes open during the plane crash and look calm doing it because these tiny people you love so much you sometimes can’t breathe, that you will fold your entire life around, that you have no control over, that you can’t and will never be able to keep out of harm’s way, they need you. Really truly need you, and you have to seem okay.
So when I learned that we passed on some crucial mental health issues to these children we love more than anything, it felt like a failure. It’s not, but it felt like it. I realized I have way less control than I thought and almost no say whether they will unknowingly inherit only the best parts of me or whether they have been handed the whole roll of tickets to this haunted funhouse dinner theater. Because over the past two years, it seems like the latter. And that someone just told them that no, actually, they cannot get off the ride. Or maybe I haven’t done as great a job at hiding those other emotions as I thought. Both? Either way, both of my children had to be hospitalized for suicidal thoughts and an actual attempt in 2021 and 2022, and I have never felt more powerless.
to be continued
January 11, 2024 update: I am still working on the second part of this article. But as I mentioned in reply to one of the comments below, I have been on quite an emotional rollercoaster lately. And spinning a bit. I remember listening to a story about deep water divers on Snap Judgement in 2014 and my kids are like the line to the surface he talks about trying to find when he is spinning underwater with vertigo. Thinking of them will always bring me back to the surface. and we all have those figures in our life (or could if we look for them) whether people or animals. So we are all actually parents. and children. and it’s really, really, really hard. Your love for them can ruin you really easily. But it can also save you if you let them.
