{"id":23,"date":"2005-12-06T10:45:42","date_gmt":"2005-12-06T15:45:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/?p=23"},"modified":"2006-06-14T21:04:50","modified_gmt":"2006-06-15T02:04:50","slug":"after-the-baby","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/?p=23","title":{"rendered":"After the baby"},"content":{"rendered":"

A lot of folks have asked me, “so, has being a parent changed your life?” I’m always a little surprised by this question. It’s sort of like being asked if marriage has changed your life. On the one hand, nothing is different at all, especially if you’ve been dating for years or even living together. Your brain has already accepted the reality of partnership long before it became “official”. On the other hand, things feel different because the whole situation is<\/em> official. It lends a warm cozy aura to the whole arrangement. With parenting, the same sort of thing applies. I had more than nine months to get used to the idea of being a parent, so when the kid actually showed up, I had no sudden traumatic realizations. It felt more like, “well, it’s about time, we’ve been ready and waiting for you for quite a while now.”<\/p>\n

If you look at my eariler posts, you can see my anxiety about parenting. I was so focused on all the scary, bad things I had heard about parenthood. At one point, I think I irritated my mother with my negativity. She ended up asking me something like, “how can you be so down when this bundle of joy is about to appear?” I didn’t understand at all, but now I do.<\/p>\n

I think that as a society, we’re really focused on the Negative. When a bunch of folks stand around a water cooler, it’s always considered perfectly fine to whine, complain, or commisserate about how awful situations are. We’re constantly looking for pity, looking to share horror stories. It’s not nearly so accepted to talk about joyful<\/em> things. If you were to start spouting off about how great your job is, how great your vacation was, or how insanely happy your family makes you, it comes off sounding like braggery. Or maybe it would just be dull; it wouldn’t be nearly as dramatic as negative stories.<\/p>\n

So before the baby came, all I’d ever heard about were parenting complaints: “oh god, the diaper changing is a nightmare”; “oh god, they’re so expensive”; “oh god, you’ll never have a moment to yourself ever again”; “oh god, your house will be destroyed”. What I didn’t<\/em> hear were the tales of joy. Nobody ever talks about how sheerly intense the joy is — maybe there are simply no good words to describe an experience so intimate, so powerful, so elating. The whole scenario is so positive, that it turns out that all the annoyances are just background noise. They don’t even matter. I knew there had to be a reason why people decide to repeat the whole baby experience over and over, despite the negative public portrayal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A lot of folks have asked me, “so, has being a parent changed your life?” I’m always a little surprised by this question. It’s sort of like being asked if marriage has changed your life. On the one hand, nothing is different at all, especially if you’ve been dating for years or even living together. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}