The Intangible Rewards of Parenting

Why do we do this? Does there have to be a good reason?

Annoying required preamble: For a while I have been wanting to write about what it was like to have my first kid. There’s a lot of intellectualization and pessimism and glib sound-biting of these issues online — whether or not to have kids. The point here isn’t to weigh in on the cool new culture war front in one way or another necessarily. This is just my experience and I write about it just because it’s a profound human experience.

A Drinking Song

W. B. Yeats

Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.

One of the greatest rewards of being a parent, I really believe, is just staring at your kid. I have spent many, many hours staring at the faces of my children.

In the first few weeks and month after my first child was born especially, I did this perhaps for hours a day. There wasn’t a whole lot else to do, since I was parked under a nursing infant for hours and hours. And I was too tired to go anywhere. Neither of my kids were good sleepers. My first one woke me up every three hours every night for the first six months, I swear upon all the world’s holy texts.

Those early weeks, I was mostly nursing while binging the Good Wife on Netflix. Despite me developing weirdly parasocial relationships with the characters in my happy, exhausted fugue state, there wasn’t a whole lot to do.

But staring at him was physically pleasurable. I would look down at the new baby while he was nursing and stare at his eyebrow. Woooooow. Fireworks of dopamine would go off in my brain. Anyone who has ever loved someone has experienced this: the pleasure of staring at their face.