A Means of Conveyance

How would be the best way to describe parenting to someone as yet unblessed with the spine-buckling burden of offspring? First of all, understand that parents rarely speak in metaphors, however dire they may seem. When I say "spine-buckling" I'm remembering that time I realized taking a 6 year old on a hike up a 1,000-foot mountain was a horrendous mistake about a quarter of the way up and then having to carry the child the rest of the way up the mountain and then 100% of the way back down as he'd fallen asleep. And just so you know, there's a point between waking and sleeping that children transmute from a regular bone skeleton to one made of lead bricks.* I remember being in too much pain to be relieved when we got to the bottom; all I could do was gently set the (now conveniently awake) child down on the ground, where I then died.

Second, the perspective you gain when you become a parent comes partially from the expanded realization of your own position on the slow-moving luggage carousel of generations, sure, but mostly it comes from being faced with irrefutable evidence that you are a fucking idiot. Everything you thought being a parent would be, based on an entire lifetime of very good information as the child of one or more parent(s) and/or the observer of all the other people you will ever meet who are in some kind of parental dynamic of their own, in time proves to be a farcical series of misunderstandings that make an episode of Three's Company look like the most painfully earnest of TED Talks about responsible home composting or some shit.

Realizing you are entirely unprepared for this lifetime commitment with immediate life-and-death consequences can be... bracing. It also puts your parents in a whole new light as you see your life all over again from their perspective, triggering new and exciting avenues of realization, like: hey, were they this fucking stupid too? Yes of course, they were. They had to be. And now whatever small ways you had to resent them before now have a real, bedrock-solid foundation in personal experience.

Any talk about the wisdom of the be-child-ed can't help but come across as an implicit slap at the child-free. To the contrary. Their level knowledge is exactly correct and perfectly suited to their circumstance. The crater of ignorance around actual child rearing can go blissfully undiscovered, obscured by nights out, or better yet, a long string of pants-optional nights in. Suggesting they're somehow less wise for not having children is like suggesting someone is an idiot for not being a master plumber on the day the pipes burst. It's a skill they likely will never need and would be fools to attempt to cultivate it in circumstances unsuited to produce a successful, practical outcome. All you really need to know is where the house shutoff valve is and now this has become an allegory for birth control. Neither intentional nor wholly unexpected, given the topic.

You go into parenthood with a preconception about how you will feel in the big moments, as the luggage carousel spins and affords you the scant, fleeting opportunities to grab what you believe is yours. At the predicted major points, you imagine the emotional payout: when they walk, when they talk, when they go to school, when they date, leave for college, get married, have their own children...

You think it'll be pride you mostly feel, maybe a few tears. It's been a big week around here, with the oldest one receiving some university acceptances and cobbling together his first real girlfriend experience. Between this and everything else before, I continue to be surprised at the fact that the main thing I feel? Relief. It's weird. It's all-encompassing and overwhelming because only when it hits can you retroactively feel the stress and strain of anticipation and hope you'd been living in beforehand. Will they walk, will they talk, will they develop intellectually and socially enough to survive or even thrive in a world full of monsters and pirates...? It's all benchmarks, with invisible and shifting criteria for success, coming and going before you knew enough to realize you should be looking out for them. Pride, sure, and fear and anxiety and giddiness and even flashes of deep existential bliss, but mostly: relief. And yes, the occasional tear. Very little of this is negotiable.

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*Reminder: no metaphors.