"I'd wanted a baby because I had taken such pleasure in life that I'd felt driven to expand the scope of existence itself. Experience was too wonderful to hoard, so I had a child. The irony was painful in that, seemingly overnight, the very things that most enlivened and sustained me—reading, watching movies, seeing friends, making love, sitting quietly by myself—were crowded out by a child whose needs absorbed nearly all of my energy and time."
"Being a parent, Johnson insisted, isn't about nobility or beauty, pride or pleasure. Rather, it is 'the simple, nerve-wracking, mindless, battering-ram process of trying to teach a savage to use a fork.' I remembered this line the way Julius Caesar, his blood pooling on the senatorial marble, must have remembered, 'Beware the ides of March.'"
"I had friends and relatives for whom I was willing to die. For my daughter, so visceral was my love, so instantaneous and complete, I knew I would kill. That I loved my daughter was never in doubt. My problem was that I didn't much like being a father."
A new father experiences an unexpected paradox: while his love for his daughter is fierce and immediate, he discovers he dislikes the actual experience of fatherhood. Having chosen parenthood to expand his life's experiences, he finds instead that his cherished activities—reading, socializing, solitude—are consumed by his child's constant demands. The exhaustion and constriction of early parenthood starkly contrast with his previous freedom. A remembered quote from writer Nora Johnson reframes parenting as a nerve-wracking, mindless process rather than something noble or beautiful. Despite the daily challenges and fatigue, his love for his daughter remains unwavering, even as he grapples with the tension between paternal devotion and personal loss.
Read at The Atlantic
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