Three Observations about Fatherhood
With another kid on the way, it's time to reflect about being a dad
You’re reading From the Desk by Miles Farnsworth. I write about the arts, spirituality, and living the good life, all while trying to analyze my own experiences and contradictions. I wrote a book about living in New Zealand as a volunteer missionary. Subscribe below to get my monthly post in your inbox.
When I started this newsletter 18 months ago, the tagline read something like “Thoughts on the arts, spirituality, and fatherhood”, and my intention was to regularly write about being a parent. My son, Nelson, was turning one, and I figured I was on the brink of truly understanding the whole dad thing.
This was naive. The fact is, I often don’t know what I’m doing as a father. That’s not to say I’m inept or a bad parent. I excel in the tactical aspects of parenting eg. the bottle, diapers, removing stains, applying creams, administering medicine, etc. I enjoy the other side of parenting, the emotional side, too. I love being a dad and building a relationship with my son.
Nevertheless, there’s no playbook to follow nor consistent set of principles that guarantee fatherly success. Parenting, so far, is a reactive discipline. Nelson changes daily, and Mickelle and I attempt to keep up with the latest challenge. We’re attempting to teach him correct behavior and virtues, but it’s too early to know how well that’s working.
That’s why I’ve refrained from writing about fatherhood. Still, I think it’s an underserved topic online, and for my essay today, I’m taking the less prescriptive approach and sharing some observations, not tips of the trade.
I should say, too, that the weight of fatherhood is pressing on my mind because we’re expecting our second child, a girl, this November. We’re ecstatic and terrified!
Since I wish there was more fatherhood content out there, I hope that other fathers will comment with their observations either on this post or privately. Hearing your thoughts on these monthly essays is one of the best parts of this newsletter.
Observation #1: Fatherhood did not alter my priorities in the way I expected
Before having kids, Mickelle and I felt we had stagnated. Not that we weren’t growing professionally, spiritually, or creatively, but life was just so easy, in a way. COVID increased this feeling. We spent every minute of the day together those first several months. After I closed my laptop at 5:30 pm, we had another five or six hours together to make dinner, watch TV, and work on our hobbies. Soon, we knew that there should be more to our lives. Having a kid, and now another, has certainly helped shake things up, catalyzing personal growth in a variety of areas.
One thing it didn’t do, however, was alter my priorities in the ways I expected.
I thought my child would come to supersede every aspect of my life. I was prepared to give up certain hobbies, and I did. However, the passions that remained grew in significance in almost an equal amount to the significance of having a child. To be clear, family is still the biggest priority, but just as it became proportionately more important to me after Nelson arrived, so did other hobbies.
Others have said it before, but one outcome of having kids is that you’re much more efficient with your time. I guess that’s what I’m trying to say has happened here, but also that with this efficiency has come an intensity that I didn’t anticipate. I’ve never been so consistent with writing or running as I have been in the last two years. I’m sharper at my job and feel more engaged. I’ve had a very demanding church assignment teaching a daily early morning bible study class but have managed to incorporate that into my schedule without jeopardizing much else.
As I’ve thought about this paradox, part of me wonders if I should feel guilty. If writing and running and work and church have all become more important to me since having a child, am I really giving my son the attention he needs? I hope the answer is yes. It’s almost as though I want Nelson to see my dedication, not to impress him, but to show him that life is more enjoyable when you’re committed to your interests. 1
Observation #2: Fatherhood doesn’t jive with my desire for control
One of my biggest flaws as a parent is my desire for control. I hope “control” is the appropriate word. I don’t helicopter or over-plan. But I typically have a singular idea of correct behavior in my head that is probably unreasonable for a toddler to adhere to. For example, when we sit down to eat, shouldn’t kids just understand that they need to eat, too? Or that in a store, they shouldn’t touch everything on the shelf?
Like all children, Nelson has a mind of his own, complete with its own logic. I thought, incorrectly, that as he got older and began to communicate better, he would appreciate sound reasoning. Instead, he’s equally stubborn and committed to his idea of a good time as I am to mine.
Fatherhood has been a long, slow process of learning how to relax my desire to control the situation and allow Nelson to dictate his own behavior. There’s a balance to this that I’m still figuring out. In practice, this looks like letting him lead the activity in the direction of his choosing, planning extra time around our day for him to explore something that piques his curiosity, and listening to him when he says he’s done. But it also means picking the right battles and calmly explaining the consequences of bad behavior.
Observation #3: Fatherhood has brought me inexplicable joy
Despite the challenges of fatherhood, it’s hard to put into words just how much joy being a father brings me. I’ve been surprised at how consistently I feel this, and how strong it becomes in certain moments, like returning home after work to a big hug or seeing the pride on Nelson’s face when he accomplishes something new.
This doesn’t mean it isn’t exhausting. Sometimes, bedtime can’t come soon enough. But when the morning comes around again and dad duty resumes, I’m ready and eager to spend time with him. When the weather is nice, we put on our shoes and go right outside to a playground or for a walk around the neighborhood lake, chitchatting and looking at cool things like buses and dandelions, along the way.
I think about a quote from the film Lost in Translation, a lot. Bob, played by Bill Murray, says to Charlotte, played by Scarlett Johansson:
It gets a whole lot more complicated when you have kids. The most terrifying day of your life is the day the first one is born… But they learn how to walk, and they learn how to talk, and you want to be with them. And they turn out to be the most delightful people you will ever met in your life.
That’s how I feel about Nelson; I imagine it’s how I’ll feel about our baby girl.
Other parents go in the opposite direction, truly making their child the only focal point of their lives. This too is a commendable path, but I don’t know if one is better than the other. One realization of fatherhood to mention in conjunction with this first observation and also the second is that children are truly their own individuals. As much as we try to put our stamp on them, they come with their own blueprint. My goal is that by maintaining my own individuality as a father, complete with my own passions, my children will feel comfortable doing the same, becoming their own distinct person.
I'm hoping to get some of that need for control out of my system before I have kids. I've been grappling with it just by having pets. When I got my cat, Mango, back in May 2021, I had unrealistic expectations about training him -- not that I wanted him to do tricks, but I figured I could get him to behave in certain ways easily enough.
I tried putting him in a harness and taking him for walks, but the outside world terrified him. I tried keeping the harness on him indoors so he'd get used to it, I moved his food dish to the door so he'd get used to the smells and sounds outside, but nothing worked.
When I got Mango, he was pretty chunky, so I tried feeding him small meals throughout the day so that he wouldn't gorge himself and then beg for more food. This seemed to backfire, as he would only nibble a bit at a time. I was baffled.
He didn't scratch furniture, but he would sometimes scratch the carpet, and he didn't scratch me, but he would sometimes bite my hand gently when I pet him. I decided this could not stand, and any time I caught him doing either, I sprayed him with a bottle to discourage the behavior. This didn't work either.
Eventually I realized that a lot of the stuff I wanted him to do was just wrong. I eventually learned that most cats are good at self-regulating and will just eat when they get hungry, so I could just fill his bowl whenever it was empty and save myself a lot of time. I also came to realize that scratching the carpet was his way of telling me he wanted me to open the bedroom door, so I just started leaving the door open instead of insisting that my cat never ever scratch the carpet under any circumstances. And so what if he bit a little? It was never painful, it was just his way of telling me to go away, so did I really need to get mad and spray him with water? What kind of loser gets mad at a cat?
In the same way, I eventually realized that Mango would never be a cat who liked going on walks. If I wanted that, I should've got a dog instead. In fact, it was probably good that he didn't like being outside! He's an indoor cat! If he's scared of the outdoors, that makes it less likely that I'll open the front door and see my cat bolt outside, never to be seen again!
Overall, I came to realize that I had an unhealthy need to make Mango do things my way, instead of celebrating the good things that came prepackaged. He was extremely soft! He loved people and he instantly trusted visitors! He didn't scratch furniture! He loved to play with string! This was the World's Best Cat, and I wanted him to conform to my own arbitrary expectations? What was I thinking?
Recently we got a puppy and it's been a more intense refresher of this lesson, because he's big and rowdy and dogs are just trainable enough that I delude myself into thinking I have control. I'm glad I've had this opportunity to recognize this tendency in myself and try to temper it, because you really can't control children, and getting angry at them doesn't magically make them behave, it just makes you a grown man who's beefing with a toddler.