Life-changing
Having a baby changes your life. Bears shit in the woods. Popes tend to be Catholic. But how can you survive the changes you might not be so keen on?
Above is a graph of my cycling over the last few years, recorded by Strava. I’m not quite Bradley Wiggins but my weekends, pre-parenthood, usually featured at least one decent-length road cycling session. Cut to the end of April 2019, when Ted was born, and it falls off a cliff. The bars in May, July and August each represent a single, short bike ride that month (two of them with fellow new dads). I didn’t get on my bike at all from September to January.
I’m sure other cycling parents find the time to get out on two wheels, but for me I found it difficult: in the later stages of Maddy’s pregnancy I was worried about being miles away from home and unable to help if she needed me. Once Ted was born, I barely had the energy to cook dinner and do the laundry, let alone go out and do proper bike rides. As the year progressed, I found myself unable to justify taking 3-4 hours off at weekends to go and ride a bike when Maddy had already spent every weekday looking after the baby alone. Leaving her parenting solo for half of another day just felt selfish, so I let it slide.
I’ve missed cycling—it’s my main hobby, really—but at the same time, I have no regrets. For one thing, spending time getting to know my son is always time well spent. For another: Maddy will go back to work soon. When she does, the balance will shift, and both of us will be spending the same amount of time caring for Ted. When that happens, it’ll be easier—for both of us—to carve out time for our own interests and activities, and not feel like it’s unfairly impacting on the other person. That’s the goal, anyway!
Your post-parenthood life changes in other ways, of course. There are friends I rarely see now: relationships which tended to exist in evenings and weekends are much more difficult to commit to when you’re sacrificing being there for bedtime, or leaving your partner to go it alone (see above). We have a bunch of new parent friends—which really helps—but find ourselves unable to do the things we’d do with other mates (eg. have them round for dinner/drinks one evening and all hang out) because you’re all too busy with your own kids and can’t leave them solo.
But you find other ways to socialise: mid-afternoon drinking on weekends with parent mates (and their kids) is loads of fun, especially when one of said parent mates runs a brewery (thanks Paul!).
Changes in schedule can be hard too. Coming home from work while Maddy is still home full-time with Ted can sometimes have the effect of leaving me feeling disenfranchised. Some days I’ve felt frustrated when I have to handle the repercussions of things that happened without my involvement: eg. Ted has missed his afternoon snooze and is now napping at 5pm when he’s supposed to be going to sleep for the night in the next ninety minutes. Inevitably this happens when it’s my turn to get up with him the next day, meaning I’ve unwittingly been signed up for a 5am wakeup call from a baby who’s raring to go.
This is unfair, of course – waking a sleeping baby is never a great idea, and conversely, trying to make a baby sleep when they don’t want to is basically impossible. But these kind of changes—eg. where you no longer have agency over things as fundamental as how you spend your time—can be hard to adjust to. But accepting it is easier than stressing. A month from now I won’t remember the grumbles I made as the baby monitor lit up at 5:01am.
Becoming a dad is the best thing I’ve ever done. My life now is wholly, completely different than it was a year ago. There are parts of the old life I miss, in the same way you look back at your twenties and miss being young and relatively unencumbered by reality. But just like I wouldn’t hop in a time machine and go back to my 20s, I wouldn’t swap any of this now. Every time Ted hits some new development milestone or discovers a thing that brings him joy, I realise that it’s because of a change that we’ve made: we’re investing in his future by sacrificing these things, and it brings us joy, too.