You are a child until you have a child

You are a child until you have a child.

Right up until the moment you hold that baby in your arms, you are a child yourself. You see the world from that perspective. You are on that side of things, and it colors everything you feel.

My dad always used to joke about how he would never go see us in our room when we were sleeping because we always looked too sweet. That’s parental humor. The good stuff.

You might be an old child, one who graduated college a decade ago, but you are still a child.

And then it all changes. Or at least the seeds of the change are planted, and you are thrown onto the other side, forever.

The great divide

The world is divided between those with children and those without. It's parents vs. the childless in our society, and the battle is just getting started. It will only intensify as we move into the future, and greater numbers of childless people grow older without becoming parents.

But I'm not here to stoke this conflict. I'm not here to attack those who, for whatever reason, don't have kids. I merely want to state a fact of life. We are not the same.

It’s hard to nail down what it is that really separates the children from those with children. It’s not politics. It’s not money. It’s not education. It’s not culture. There are those with children and those without on all sides.

Nor is it being a good person. There are bad people who are bad parents. Great people who are not parents.

It’s not necessarily responsibility either, even though kids do demand that. It’s deeper than all these things. It’s some kind of essence or knowledge. Or maybe it’s some kind of acceptance of a constellation of truths that you only perceive once you have kids.

Falling short

There’s something about imperfection. That’s one of those truths in the constellation. It’s not just the surface imperfection of the scratched up tables, the walls that always end up covered in scribbles, or the realization that you are not going to have “nice things” for a long time.

(And that’s OK, by the way. Nice things are overrated.)

But it’s more than all that. Something stranger. It’s about the imperfection of life itself. Having kids forces us to give up trying to think of ourselves as perfect. When we are parents, we try to be better than we were, because we want to be good role models. So we aspire to be greater (or more perfect) in this sense.

But at the same time, our children can't help but reveal how far we fall short. Their innocence reveals our corrupt nature in more poignant terms. Life isn’t perfect; neither are we.

You’re beat, sick of work, sick of corralling the kids in the car, sick of ushering them along the sidewalk, sick of cleaning up rice from the floor after dinner, tired as hell, and counting down the minutes until you can finally get a break once the kids are in bed. And then, once they are finally asleep, about 15 minutes later, you feel bad for wanting to get them in bed as soon as possible.

“Damn it.”

The good stuff

There’s a certain way you say that word as a dad. Under your breath, by yourself, in the morning, late at night, in the car, out back behind the house, just sitting there by the window, looking at a photo of your kids from a few years back.

The way you say it, that’s the tragic part. The resigned part.

It’s the feeling that no childless person understands. My dad always used to joke about how he would never go see us in our room when we were sleeping because we always looked too sweet. That’s parental humor. The good stuff. Sardonic and deeply sensitive at the same time, if you get it. It’s the stuff that you can’t relate to if you are childless.

You are spinning plates when you have kids. Your arms reach wider, and you are pulled 100 ways at once.

Benevolent dictator

You take on more roles than ever before. You are like a dictator who controls the education system, religious system, medical system, housing, and everything else you could possibly imagine all at the same time, 24/7, for decades.

Your stress tolerance increases, and you just naturally start to think about yourself less than you did before. You fade in a sense, and you are no longer the center of your own world.

You are a leader and need to manage your people like a ruler manages his, and it demands a stronger stomach. You have to lie all the time because you don’t ever tell your kids the whole truth. Answers for a 5-year-old aren’t fully honest answers. There are things they shouldn’t know yet.

You also teach your kids never to lie in the next breath. Yes, it’s complicated.

In truth, for parents the concerns of the childless are hard to take so seriously. They seem more and more petty the deeper into parenthood you get. They feel like the concerns of children.

But you know they don’t feel like it to them because you remember how you felt before you had kids, when you were a child, too. It’s not their fault for feeling like that, and it’s not ours for feeling like we do. None of it is anyone’s fault. It’s OK, we all have our own role in this life. But we aren’t the same.

You’re a child until you have a child, and you can never go back.