My Brother, on the Birth of Your Daughter

I'd like to share some of my experience of the revelatory power of parenting in the hopes that it will serve as a kind of blessing to you and your young family.

I hope this is useful to you. I suppose there's a chance you won't experience any of what I'm talking about, but I've learned enough from my own experience and from wise people whom I trust to believe that most people do go through this. Often they don't talk about it, or even recognize what's happening to them.

Take what serves you, leave the rest.

News You Already Knew

You've no doubt heard many things about what it's like to be a father and husband, to raise a family, to endure sleep loss and the new and unique forms of stress you'll enjoy; the unexpected joys and the expected ones; the miraculous growth that occurs as your family learns how to be a family – it's all awesome and inexpressible.

You are going to lose yourself entirely in this process. The sleepless nights, the constant need of a little one, the need to earn a living, the need to still be a husband and partner while taking care of your own physical and mental health – all of this and more will consume you.

The good news is that through this process of losing yourself, you will find yourself, and you do so through this process of pain, loss, and healing.

You're going to learn a lot about yourself, and a side-effect of gaining self-knowledge is that there will be times when you won't recognize yourself. Yes, you'll feel like you're going insane, but it's important to know that losing yourself might not feel like losing your grip on reality.

It may instead mean behaving in ways that you're not proud of. It may mean having wants, urges, and fears that are hard to admit that you're feeling; thoughts like, "I hate my wife and child," "This was a mistake," "I'm trapped." You may feel these thoughts deep in your body, such that you're convinced they're real, and you may hate yourself as a result.

Your wife is going to lose herself as well – she will become a different person, with different priorities, in similar ways to what you'll experience. Despite your own inherent awesomeness, you are now the second most important person in her world. In sometimes subtle ways, what she needs and what she wants will be different from when you met her and when you married her.

Naturally, you'll both try to maintain whatever you can of your old selves, but after a while, that effort only makes things worse. You'll find yourself blaming each other for petty and important things, each of you trying to assert that the other person is the one who has changed and needs to correct their behavior. You've no doubt experienced some of this in marriage already.

The Way

Marriage and child-rearing is a primal force, and it destroys people, sometimes quickly and sometimes over decades. There are mistakes you can make during this process that can threaten your growth and your relationships with your family. Our great spiritual, mystic, and artistic traditions tell us that the worst thing we can do is resist the transformation that's occurring within us.

Think of people who become parents and then fight tooth-and-nail to keep the carousing of their youth alive. Or think of those who should be our elders behaving like they're lost in the wilderness of middle-age.

The elders we ultimately admire have a grace and understanding about them. They know what's important, and they're finished with the youthful tussling over triviality. It's not just that those elders have seen a lot in their day, it's also that they learned to recognize the seasons of their life, and they do the internal work of preparing for it.

You must explore the season that you're in right now. To do so, you'll need time to yourself and so will your wife. Caretaking is uniquely exhausting, since no matter how burned out you get, the person you're caring for is still doing worse than you are. You'll feel selfish, but it's critical that you get time to renew yourself physically, mentally, and emotionally. Going back to work will help with this, so get as much nourishment as you can from your work: enjoy the space, the change of scenery, the creativity and feeling of contribution to organization and society, soak up as much as you can.

At home, it can be hard to ask for and arrange for time to yourself. You won't have much time, but you won't need much if you use it wisely. The key is to know what your needs are (this will change from day to day), and what the best activities to meet those needs are.

You might find yourself pushing your self-care aside because of some dynamic of your relationship, e.g. she got really upset last time you did some activity and you just don't need her annoyed at you again, so you don't ask. This might happen a lot.

We cling to our victimhood, and phrases like "there's never enough time," or "If I don't do this thing, bad stuff will happen," or "she got annoyed last time I…" become cherished and self-reinforcing beliefs.

Notice when this happens, but don't think poorly of yourself or despair. Sometimes you can't rationalize, exercise, meditate, or medicate yourself out of this feeling. It will pass on its own, and you'll soon find yourself doing the hard, healthy work of arranging time for yourself in the midst of the chaos of a young household.

Whenever you can, practice the act of loving yourself – this is active, not passive; it's a practice, not a science. Imagine a friend having the same difficult thoughts you're having, imagine them sharing those thoughts with you and then treat yourself the way you would treat that friend. You'll get better at this as you practice, and your other self-care activities will make it easier for you to get to that place of self love.

Probably the most important thing is to find a few close friends or family who you can trust with your painful stories. You can't tell these stories to just anyone – though you may love and respect a person, an unskilled response can make your situation worse.

A good test of what the Celts called a "soul friend" is when you tell them something potentially shameful (e.g. "I find myself having negative thoughts about my wife/child"), and their response is, "Oh? Tell me more about it," or "Yeah, that's hard." Their response should make you feel bad about yourself or distract you from your own intentions by trying to solve the problem for you.

Avoid people who might respond with phrases like, "Uh-oh! You should probably see somebody about that," or "Dude, you don't know how good you have it," or "Get out of there as soon as you can, it only gets worse if you wait." You want a friend who will hold space for you to air your wounds without judging, pressuring, advice giving, or one-upping.

Soul friends help you discern whether your urge to run is a normal response to change, or if it's your soul telling you you're in the wrong place. That's really hard to tell by yourself. Bring most of your fears and desires to your wife, but there are also times to talk with a soul friend before talking to her.

Conclusion

I can't say this enough – the struggle is the thing. You must learning to struggle well, practicing the struggle together and with other people will make sure you're going to be okay.

Practice holding space for each other's fears and desires. Think as a family, but remember that each of your individual hopes and dreams are sacred and need tending, especially amid the chaos. When the fears and longings seem insurmountable to the family's future, look for those elusive third solutions, that often exist in the midst of really hard problems.

We don't know how the larger story of our lives knits together. So when things are hard, remember that you're still in the middle of a story being written.

Together, through all of what's to come, you will shed the stuff that is no longer important to you, and you will feel a sense of freedom and purpose like you've never felt before.

Your story right now is one of transformation, of one part of you dying and another being born, of losing yourself, and losing each other, and then finding yourselves, as individuals, as a couple, and as a family.