Notes On Parental Frustration

The feeling underneath the feeling

My son just turned five months old. The conventional wisdom around raising kids is that “the days are long but the years are short,” but my experience so far has been the opposite. It feels like I’ve been a father for way longer than five months. Actually, I don’t even know if time is the appropriate marker here. My life before he was born, even as recently as this past summer, feels like an entirely different reality, some variant in the multiverse. The sliding glass doors of the hospital were a wormhole, transporting us from one dimension into a new one.

Every other cliché description of parenting, however, has been completely true. I’ve operated on levels of sleep previously thought to be insurmountable. I’ve changed more dirty diapers and wiped up more vomit and pee than I could even begin to quantify. If you showed me some kind of Spotify-esque “Bodily Fluids Wrapped 2025” I’m sure the final tally would both astound me and seem completely reasonable. When parents tell you what life is like once you have a baby, believe them. It’s all true. In fact, they might be underselling it.

All of this stuff has been difficult but manageable. The lack of sleep was debilitating at first, but now I’m so used to being tired that it doesn’t impact me the same way anymore. Blown out diapers are no longer a catastrophe, they’re just another recurring part of my domestic life, like brushing my teeth or washing the dishes. I’ve developed a sort of mental immunity to these small, daily challenges.

But there’s one challenge that’s been far more difficult than all of the others. The hardest thing about parenting, for me at least, has been the complete loss of personal agency.

Agency is something I value very highly, as I mentioned in my very first post on this Substack. I believe the greatest gift we have as human beings is our ability to dictate the terms of our own life. No one is ever in complete control of their destiny, the world is simply too chaotic for that. But, through sheer effort and will, we can shape our lives to more closely resemble what we want. This was the central tenet of my personal philosophy when I was doing stand-up and after I quit. I’ve always strived, to the best of my ability, to control where I put my time and energy.

That’s all gone now. My time is no longer my own. It is instead occupied by the tasks I’ve listed above, among many others. I know that’s what you sign up for when you become a parent, but understanding it intellectually and accepting it in reality are two different things.

Even after my wife and I put the baby to bed and are able to take a minute to breathe, something still feels off with me. I can’t relax, and I don’t feel comfortable or at ease. I think this is because, for the past five months, I haven’t been able to exercise, read, or write. I can’t engage in any of the major activities I use to emotionally regulate myself. At a time where I need them the most, they’re no longer available to me.

In my previous life, if I was having a rough day or feeling agitated for some reason, I could always count on exercise, reading or writing to level me out. Most days I was able to do all three. I could rest my head on my pillow at night with some semblance of peace. Now, after a long day of professional obligations and childcare duties, I just try and get to bed as quickly as possible so I can rack up a decent amount of sleep before the baby wakes up and the day’s tasks start all over again. There’s no time for anything else.

This has compounded over time, and the effects have been noticeable. This is my first Substack post in nearly three months. I’ve read two (2) total books since my son was born, neither of which I’ve enjoyed. I was surprised to find myself losing weight throughout the Fall, but I soon realized that I was just losing muscle mass and I’m now at a skinny-fat version of my goal weight. Sometimes I’ll touch my biceps and their doughy softness causes me to reflexively frown.

The hardest part of each day has been the few hours after I get home from work. Our son is very restless and needs constant stimulation, otherwise he starts crying. So my job after I get home from my day job is to constantly move around and keep him occupied while my wife makes dinner and prepares his bedtime routine. It’s great to see him after nine plus hours at the office, and the smile I’m greeted with is the highlight of my day, but my physical and mental energy starts to flag twenty minutes in as I continuously move him from his bouncer to his playmat and back to his bouncer, rotating through different toys along the way, working overtime to avoid any potential infant meltdowns.

I realize this is all objectively positive. There are countless people out there who want nothing more than this experience, myself included. I prayed for a son with a strong Will to Power and an excess of spirit, and God delivered. But all the while I still feel my brain aching for a moment, just a brief moment, of peace and solitude so that I can reacquire some temporary measure of internal stability.

So yeah, the past five months have been challenging to say the least.

But - let me interject with a major, major - BUT! While I’m feeling all of this, one thing remains glaringly obvious to me. I know this frustration isn’t what makes up the core of my experience as a father. It’s merely surface level, a superficial emotion that obscures the transcendent truth underneath. That truth is hard to articulate, so I’ll have to use an example from a TV show.

The Leftovers is about what happens when 2% of the world’s population suddenly disappears with no explanation whatsoever. One second these people are all here, walking and talking and taking up space, and the next they vanish into thin air. Most of the show focuses on the aftermath of this event. What is the world like a few years after something this devastating and inexplicable happens? But there is one flashback scene that showcases the moment itself, and it’s stuck with me ever since I saw it way back in 2014.

It’s actually a montage of several different scenes from the day of the “Sudden Departure”, but one sequence in particular stands out. A woman is doing her laundry in a public laundromat while on the phone, engaged in some kind of customer service bureaucratic nightmare (“Are you the same person I was just talking to? I don’t HAVE the reference number!”). All the while, her baby is crying in a portable car seat next to her. After finishing her laundry - but not before experiencing that uniquely modern indignity of having to put money into a poorly functioning machine to buy a card to pay for the laundry instead of just using quarters like everyone did in the past - she carries the baby out to her car in the parking lot. She’s on the phone again, this time explaining something banal and mundane to her husband as the baby continues to cry. She’s clearly at the end of her rope, having experienced one frustration after another all day, and the noises coming from the car seat are only making matters worse. It’s one of those moments where, as a parent, your only wish is for your child to just shut up.

Unfortunately for her, she gets her wish.

While she’s preoccupied in the driver’s seat of the car, the crying stops mid-scream. She turns and looks behind her, only to find an empty car seat. She then has a complete mental breakdown, as does everyone else around her as they search for their own suddenly missing loved ones.

While the baby was still present and screaming, I’m sure all she wanted in that moment was to not have to deal with him. She had too much on her plate, and an inconsolable child was the last thing she needed. But once the baby is gone, the trivial nature of everything else is laid bare, exposed once she loses the only thing in her life that actually matters.

That’s the best way I could describe the emotional state of being the parent. It’s unbelievably exhausting and frustrating. It adds an unfathomable degree of difficulty to once simple tasks. It breaks you down both physically and mentally. It robs you of your autonomy and sense of self. But if it all ended tomorrow, it would be the single worst thing that had ever happened to you.

This is what I need people who don’t want kids or are unsure about having kids to understand, and what people who already have kids intuitively understand. Yes, all of the negative things you hear about parenting are 100% true. It’s as hard as they say it is, if not harder. But that’s not even close to the totality of the experience. The problem is that the hard stuff is easy to describe. The positive stuff is not. And since non-parents only hear about the hard stuff, that’s what they fixate on.

Chappell Roan caused a bit of an online controversy last year with some comments she made on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast. When talking about her friends with kids, she said:

All of my friends who have kids are in hell. I actually don’t know anyone who’s like, happy and has children at this age. Like, a one-year-old, three-year-old, four and under, five and under, I literally have not met anyone who’s happy, anyone who has light in their eyes, anyone who has slept.

Her perception is straight up incorrect. Even though I’m always tired, I am certainly not in hell, and there is still plenty of light in my eyes. However, I can’t say I blame her for thinking this way. That seems to be the totality of parenthood from the outside. But what Chappell and those who think like her don’t understand is that having kids ultimately exists outside of simple binaries like happy or unhappy, good or bad. Yes, all of those challenges are real, but your frame of reference for them is completely upended. Your life becomes more difficult, but also more full in ways that you can’t properly describe. Even the phrase “unconditional love” doesn’t do it justice.

In my experience, a lot of the positivity in parenting is found through the sense of fulfillment you get from caring for this small, innocent baby that needs you every second of every day. They’re depending on you and trusting you to nurture and love them, and when you’re able to do that day after day, you feel a wholeness that is impossible to achieve anywhere else. What could possibly compare? What could feel better than that? Those sleepless nights are difficult, but that wholeness is strong enough to make you get out of bed every single time. This is why that woman was so despondent in The Leftovers. She was never going to feel that wholeness ever again.

And let’s not forget the fact that there are plenty of genuinely happy moments in between the challenging ones. Even if they’re grossly outnumbered, they still feel incredible. I relish the time after every bath where we wrap our son in a towel and he looks like an AI generated image of a baby, optimized for maximum cuteness. I still laugh my ass off every time he lets out an adult-sized burp after finishing a full 8 ounce bottle. I’ve never felt the type of relief I felt when his week-long diaper rash started to clear once we found the right combination of topical creams. Again, there’s a higher volume of difficult moments, but these happy ones provide a welcomed, momentary break from them. They are little pockets of peace that accumulate over time.

And here’s something else that’s important to remember about the difficult moments: they don’t last forever. I now see some light at the end of the tunnel for my wife and I. We spent the last two weeks of December sleep-training our son and he is now reliably sleeping through the night, going to bed at 8pm and waking up between 6:30 and 7am. I’ve since been able to string together a handful of 8-hour nights of sleep and I feel nearly superhuman. A reliable sleep schedule also means I know when he’ll wake up, and I can now start planning early morning trips to the gym. My goal is to get back into pre-baby shape by my 40th birthday in May. I still have no idea where I’m going to find time to read and write more consistently, but I’ll figure it out eventually. It won’t be happening as frequently as before, but I trust that I’ll be able to carve out moments for it, even if it’s just on the weekends.

I sometimes imagine what I’d be doing during a given moment if I didn’t have a baby. This past Christmas break certainly would have been more relaxing if I didn’t have to worry about anyone else but myself. I probably would have taken more naps and gone to see Marty Supreme. But I know that would have felt hollow, like something incredibly important was missing. I’ve crossed the Rubicon now. I’ve burned the boats. There’s nothing you could possibly offer that would make me want to go back to the way things were before, even if that life was orders of magnitude easier. I’m content right where I am. Even if I don’t have the level of agency I want, what I do have in my life is more than enough.

I can never forget how truly privileged I am to be this exhausted.