Not my experience at all. A small child is so fascinated by the parents that one feels like a movie star. I’ve never had anybody who’d be so minutely, unflaggingly, intensely interested in me as my child. I’ve never had such a thankful audience for my every joke, anecdote, or story. It’s a very intense feeling to be so extremely important to another human being, to be so admired, so studied, so passionately defended from mostly imagined slights.
Your children think you hang the moon every evening because for them you actually do. And another thing is that they will need you even when you are eighty, so it becomes very, very important to stay alive as long as possible. So please don’t worry, it will become about you like never before when you have a child.
Clarissa's Blog 
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It is the most indescribable feeling. Being a parent gave me a sense of importance like nothing else has before or since. That being said, I did struggle in the immediate postpartum period of my first child with feeling as though my life was over. It went away after a couple of months, when she slept better (she was my only kid with colic and was inconsolable for a huge chunk of the newborn phase), and my hormones sorted themselves out.
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Postpartum is hormonal, a physiological reaction. I wish more people understood that this isn’t about feelings or thoughts but pure physiology.
I had a very short postpartum depressive state, and, curiously, the only time I felt something similar again was when I had COVID.
COVID needs to be studied a lot because it clearly has a strong hormonal component and nobody says anything. My second COVID kicked me into diabetes lightning fast.
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Do not underestimate the colic.
My first had it, nonstop, for three months. Total hell.
He’s pretty great now, though 😉
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OT: but I was thinking about love, and children, and feeling dreadfully sentimental I guess, and wrote up a eulogy of sorts. I think it turned out OK, and so, with some trepidation, break containment between internet identities:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-154108563
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Dude, you made me cry. This story really got to me. It speaks to the very nature of love.
You should definitely keep writing. The post on fertility is also great and very important. I never cease to be stunned at how the institution of grandparenting is completely absent in America. I know people who live two streets over from their grandchildren and see any suggestion to babysit as a huge imposition. “What am I supposed to do, cancel my tennis lesson?” Well, if it’s exercise you are looking for, a couple of kids will provide enough of that.
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It made me cry, too, but that’s because I miss these people.
I think, sometimes, part of the reason so many grandparents are so selfish is because they’ve never been through anything really terrible. God’s forge is the metaphor I use in my head to try and make that make sense: that my older relatives, who’d been through *ghastly* things, were such amazingly kind people. I only know a tiny part of that story. Tony fought with the allies in Europe, and I have no idea where or what action he saw. He never breathed a word about it. You’d think the war didn’t exist, but I know it was a formative experience for him.
But also, that all these amazingly kind people acted like a big pillowy buffer for people like us: the kids with the dysfunctional parents. My parents were totally the black sheep of the family, and I never caught even a *whiff* of any of these folks holding it against us, the kids. Breaks my heart that we don’t live near any of my kids’ old aunties, and that there are so very few of them. It wasn’t like I was unique: my best neighbor friend and I used to also bike across the neighborhood to visit *her* grandmother. Who always had carrot cake and was also always delighted to see us.
Anyway, thanks for taking the minute. It’s one thing for internet randos who don’t know how to use apostrophes to say: this is great. I respect your opinion so it means more 😉
I had a wicked fun time writing the Downward Mobility post, but I think you have to have grown up Protestant in America for that one… I was pretty sure I had nailed the fertility one when I finally got a commenter in there going “Oh God this is so uncomfortable to read!” Yessss. I meant it that way 😀
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“writing the Downward Mobility post, but I think you have to have grown up Protestant in America for that one…”
My family was not religious in any traditional way…. theoretically we were Methodists on my mother’s side (some Quakers in their somewhere but details are fuzzy) but reading your essay… no way were we up to Methodist economic standards which might explain the lack of churchgoing.
Still I do think of myself as a kind of cultural protestant (it’s the socio-religious environment I come from even if I didn’t participate beyond some summer church programs though I think those weren’t necessarily Methodist…).
I do feel the the black sheep energy though (we had that in spades, not so much in the family but in the town for sure) and the ‘we can’t have people over’ energy… we had guests fairly frequently but no locals… they were passing through or lived a bit further away and tended toward circus people or cowboys or other assorted kooks (of which my parents knew… a whole bunch they didn’t collect them as such but they didn’t not collect them either….).
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Black sheep energy is about right.
And yeah… the people my parents felt comfortable visiting, and being visited by, was– well, not circus people because we didn’t live in Sarasota. But it always seemed like we knew a surprising number of drunks, fortune-tellers, schizophrenics, motorcycle dudes, bipolar embezzlers, herpetologists, and con artists (my parents would straight-up say: oh yeah, *Name* is a con-artist. He’s fantastic at parties, don’t ever go into business with him…).
The herpetologists were the most normal.
It took me a while to figure out that you can’t just say: “Oh, yeah, I have an aunt who’s a witch…” and you have to temper that down to: “Oh, yeah, my aunt plays the banjo…”
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