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Illustration by Juliana Neufeld
It didn’t take long for me to figure out that parenting was hard.
The first weekend I was on paternity leave my spouse left for the cottage after nine months of being our daughter’s primary caregiver. It was a break she both needed and deserved.
Even then, our nine month old was what the doctor called a “gross-motor baby”: capable of crawling fast enough to catch an unsuspecting or unmotivated cat, with advanced pincher skills to match.
I remember one tough morning on Day 2 of daddy-daughter weekend. Despite my best efforts at babyproofing, she is finding exactly those things that she is not supposed to play with – the dog’s water dish, the loose ventilation grates, plants on a low table where they can get some sun. Aside from this she is squawking and moaning.
I have been chasing her around since she woke up two hours ago at 5 a.m. I am tired and frustrated, and have taken precisely three sips of my coffee, which is already cold. I am at my absolute limit.
I try to change her, in hopes of improving her mood, when the squawking turns to cries. She twists and squirms on the changing table making it impossible for me to do the one thing I can think of to improve our situation.
I am suddenly and completely angry. Angry at the cries I have been listening to all morning. Angry at her insistence on fighting me every time I change her diaper, every time I put her to bed. Angry at having to keep one eye on this child at all times, and never having more than a handful of moments to myself.
My anger (of course) only makes her more upset, and soon we are both crying, exhausted and frustrated, neither of us knowing what to do.
Eventually, we settle and eat and she goes to bed. And I wonder: are we going to make it without my partner? Am I cut out to be a parent? Maybe I am too old for this, or have the wrong temperament or personality, to care for children?
I’ve always thought about myself as a caring, patient person: the sort of person who lets people in front of them during traffic jams; assumes you have a good reason to cut the line at the airport; believes that most people act badly only if they have a good reason to do so.
I thought these easygoing qualities would make parenting easy, but that is not remotely true because care is different from empathy.
All empathy asks is for you to imagine yourself in someone else’s shoes and act accordingly.
Care asks you to put aside your morning coffee, the one you have drank every day, at the same time, for 20 years. It asks you to skip the shower, meal or bathroom break that you desperately need, having already skipped the previous one. It asks you to treat the imaginary pains of your child as if they were real – not because they are harmful, but because they are real to her. Even when it is difficult, inconvenient or impossible to do so.
I was ready to put in the hours, but I wasn’t ready to give up the small things. The little moments where your life happens exactly as you want it to because those moments are yours and yours alone.
For me, care is like one of those tiny muscles in your butt that you don’t even realize exists until you try skating for the first time.
As a child (i.e., until last year) I assumed that love and care were qualities my mother naturally possessed as a matter of fact, like hair colour or shoe size. It never occurred to me that it might be something she had to work at, something that might have been difficult for her.
As a kid, I used to step on her ingrown toenails for fun. I used to strip naked in the middle of the bank, and hide behind clothes racks in department stores without telling her. I called her “old as a dinosaur” long after the joke got old.
Now that I have a child of my own, I can start to think of what that was like for her. How many times did I leave her on the verge of breakdown without ever knowing it? How many times did I stretch those care muscles to the point of failure, only to have them grow back stronger, fiercer, out of love for me?
Months after that rough morning on my own, and with two weeks left in my leave I realized I had everything I needed to be a calm, caring, understanding parent – all I had to do was keep working at it.
Instead of fighting those stressful feelings, I give in – I will lift my daughter gently away from the cat whose tail she is pulling or the plants she is about to tip over. I kiss her and place her in front of some toys as a distraction. My plan is likely to fail and I will still be frustrated and tired. But I care too much to do anything else.
Richard Welch lives in Toronto.