To Love a Child

The only time in my life I’ve been a bad student was when I was falling in love with my husband. I’m type A, problematically diligent. But in the autumn of our whirlwind romance, I let it all slip.

It was intentional and not: I waited giddily for his time zone, studying until the call, then spent our daily hours talking until my skin couldn’t hold in all the sunshine. I was so full of love, I had to run, move, couldn’t care about my work enough to stop—even when I had to drop a class.

Having a kid is like that: you are ridiculously in love, and you don’t have time for other important things. But it isn’t temporary: that crazy energy of falling, realizing you’re loved back, the sliding that happens to your other priorities.

Life needs seasons. A high that never ends is exhausting. You have to do other things: maintain the love, and also take care of yourself. And with a kid, unlike a good partner, you can’t expect reason or maturity. It doesn’t settle, deep and sustainable.

Their love for you is all-consuming, and if they’re not the center of your world (even briefly), they don’t understand. Not to mention all the things they can’t do for themselves—the new things you must do.

“It’s objectively terrible at all the ages,” I try to explain to my childless friends—failing abjectly.

The creature is demanding. And you love both their dependence and their growing independence.

When you’re in love, you don’t just love the parts that are good. You love the uniqueness: the goofiness, the dumb flaws. You find their specific face incomprehensibly beautiful. It’s the personhood. You can’t get over the preciousness of this individual human.

If you can feel this in romantic love, imagine the intensity of it with a creature from your body, whose first instinct is to adore you utterly. Who trusts and needs you to keep them alive.

And now imagine them growing before your eyes, developing those perfect flaws that mean they’re human: every week noticeably more themselves than they’ve ever been. More silly. More chaotic. More capable.

This is what dissolves you. People can’t just spend all their time being in love. It fills you, and it breaks you. You adore this tiny, unreasonable creature, and you need a shower, a hot meal, sleep. Time to be your own person. Not to mention the demands of the external world.

Every day I ask: How is a thing this wonderful even alive? And also, how can I get him to leave me alone?

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Surviving the Joy

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Jun 19

Fall My full-time mothering starts as summer turns to fall: just me and an eight-month baby, filling time in the foreign city we’ve moved to for my husband’s job. Robert is gone from six thirty to six: thus, my daily shift is about twelve hours — not counting nighttime interruptions, breastfeeding, and everything else. It doesn’t se…