Parenthood's Brutal Math
On starting small
There’s a brutal math to parenthood where it forces you to start small over and over and over again.
You, of course, have to start small with baby.
Baby is small. They can hardly move. They don’t understand. They can’t tell you what they need. In a lot of important ways, babies are straight up unable to do anything.
So, as a parent, you do everything for them. Feed, clean, soothe, love, care, hold. All the jobs to be done.
But soon you realize there’s a limit to how much you can do for them. Two limits really.
The first is your own limits on how much you can physically give. You need food, sleep, and care too (though you pretend you don’t for as long as possible). This is the upteenth memetic metajoke you see in any scene about exhausted new parents.
The second limit is less explored, especially for young children.
Your child needs you, but the amount of you they can receive has a ceiling. You can only feed so much, you can only comfort so much, you can only control so much. Baby always gets the final vote on how much they need you at any given moment.
Parenthood’s brutal math is perhaps most surprising in that it also applies to you.
The instinct to give everything you possibly can is painfully restrained by the stark realities of how a human baby grows.
Fortunately, the ceiling of this care does change over time. It expands. It gains shape and texture and color, like a vision of rich, rolling prairie grass slowly pulling into focus in the sunrise. It’s beautiful at first glimpse, but becomes even more so with every added detail gifted by the next ounce of light.
The simple care you give at first, eventually, grows. It grows because it now has space to grow.
Your gentle feeding turns into feeding and locking eyes. Soon this turns into feeding and locking eyes and smiling together. Eventually it’s all of that, plus joyful babbling back and forth. Over time, baby develops the capacity to receive your care in new, deeper and more nuanced ways.
But every new way to care, again, starts small.
Long before a child arrives, our identity is rooted in many things. Your own witch’s brew of self will vary, but it’s likely some combination of your work, personal relationships, hobbies, media consumed, and interests. Or at least it was.
In much the same way as your baby suddenly lost its nice, calm, warm, and cozy home in the womb, you too have lost your inner home. It turns out that a lot of the things that made you you are no longer accessible after you become a parent (for at least a little while).
Some of this is the nuts and bolts of infant care.
Baby cries, you can’t sleep.
Baby cries, you put down your guitar.
Baby cries, you’ll finish that email later.
Baby cries, you close your book.
Baby cries, you can’t finish your dinner.
Even as I type this paragraph, I’ve already soothed my son back to sleep twice.
More than any single substituted activity, it’s really the focus-disrupting, always-on that reshapes your relationship with yourself bit by bit.
If you didn’t have a relationship with yourself before baby, the sheer volume of quiet care you’re giving more or less forces you to address that particular cognitobomb. You spend too many midnight hours alone in your own head to avoid the confrontation.
But if you had a relationship with yourself already, the grief creeps in. Sometimes regret too, but I’d describe it as the sensation of watching a loved one transit the final stages of terminal illness.
You saw your death coming from a mile away. You prepared as best you could. But your preparation can’t change the unblinking fact that you live the finger snap of self death over and over and over again.
Knowing isn’t the same as feeling, which isn’t the same as processing, which isn’t the same as accepting.
And accepting isn’t the same as rebecoming yourself.
The brutal math tabulates, but the figures hint at the next step.
It starts small.
It’s just a fraction of the thing you used to reach for instinctively.
Some scales instead of a song. A bite-sized task instead of a weekend project. A page instead of a chapter.
Til you get the next ounce of light.