I wasn’t prepared for them to be so much better than me at things at such a young age. My daughter, now 13, is a gifted writer. The emotion she can evoke in a few words takes everyone who reads her work’s breath away. My son, 16, can solve any engineering problem. His robotics teacher doesn’t know how to keep him challenged. This skill was evident from toddler age. I can’t do either of these things.
Their gifts and talents awe me.
Jesús. Has he recovered?
I’m at that point with my little girl where I’m having to explain every thing. EVERY SINGLE THING. Why mommy why mommy why mommy why mommy WHY MOMMY!?
And sometimes I just don’t have the answer. I try though, and it shows because if I try to get away with an “I don’t know” she will ask why don’t I look it up on the computer. So far I’ve had luck, or if I didn’t I could provide a proper distraction but one day she’s going to ask the big questions and I’m going to be faced with a “nobody knows”. I have a feeling she will never be satisfied with this sort of answer. But that’s a good thing too, I suppose.
Sometimes it’s really exhausting.
It’s even better when you KNOW the answer and find it next to impossible to put it into terms they will understand.
Like what does blood do. (I nailed it but it’s not always easy.)
I had no idea how much parenting was going to be ad-libbed.
Yeah. I wish we’d sprung for the manual.
Rushgeekgirl, in the last couple of weeks I’ve had to explain what blood does, what a skeleton is, and how magnets work. The last didn’t go so well. It really is hard, trying to put things in preschooler terms.
Hey there, Maeglin. You pretty much summed up my feelings on this fatherhood gig better than I could.
Do you have someone you can vent to (outside the family)? I’m lucky that I’ve got a few colleagues/friends who also have young children, so we can all commiserate. Doubly lucky, in fact, that since we all know each other pretty well we don’t feel that need to qualify all our kid-related rants with the obligatory cheesy “Oh, but really s/he’s wonderful and I love being a parent” disclaimer that seems so common.
Anyway, if you ever feel the need to let off some steam, feel free to PM me. 
–Pazu (father of 4-year-old twins)
I just remembered another thing I wasn’t prepared for: how stressful a baby (especially the first) could be on a marriage. We thought we had everything worked out - we had hammered out all our major issues beforehand and thought we agreed on everything. Then the baby came.
Oh, boy. Nothing could’ve prepared me for the lethal mix of hormones and minor irritations. If my husband made even the smallest comment about something I was doing, I would cry. If he disagreed over something I was doing, it had the potential to explode into this huge fight. He felt the same way, but not nearly as strongly as me. It was absolutely nuts.
I still remember getting into an argument over the temperature of the bathwater and whether going from a warm bath to a chilly room would result in an instant cold, as my husband insisted. There were times when I felt that our marriage was ending because of these stupid little things. Luckily we worked through them and came out on the other side unscathed, but for a while there I felt like I was in crazyland. I probably was.
Yeah, but then you would have had to get the next one in a couple weeks. With two kids, you’d have a whole roomful by now.
The thing I was unprepared for? How you can be so excited to see them do something and so sad about it all at once. I stood out of my son’s sight, silently cheering him on as he pulled himself up, hand over hand on the side bars of his crib and finally getting both hands on the top bar and proudly standing, and then I cried. Every step they take is a step away. Everything they learn to do means they need you a little less. And it’s a good thing. So are the tears joy or sadness? Yes. Yes, they are.
One of the warnings my wife read in one of the many, many books she read (as referenced in pbbbth’s pregnancy thread) was that she may find herself seriously considering divorce during the very early baby stages. Which she did.
Someone should probably tell pbbbth.
I’m reading this thread too!
Maeglin, as a father of two small children, I can commiserate. The only reason I have children is because my wife wanted to and I loved her enough to go along with it. If it was up to me I would probably never have had children. When our first child came I was concerned that I wouldn’t develop the emotional bond that a parent should have for a child. It did eventually happen, but it certainly wasn’t instantaneous. Now, three years later, I can honestly say I would step in front of bus for them, and they enrich my life in ways I couldn’t think of before. Give it time.
The complete drought in the bedroom. It’s pretty fucking frustrating.
Echoing and adding to what others have said: Maeglin, it’s gonna be fine. Right now your kid is just a potential person, and like you, I found that hard to relate to. Now that my little girl is almost 4, has her own likes and dislikes, and holds conversations and plays in story form, loving her is easy. She’s a person now, not just an idea.
Back to the OP, what I was unprepared for: how much of my happiness is tied up in that little munchkin.
Yeah, I’m always dumbfounded by people who will have a baby as a last-ditch attempt to save an already-flailing relationship!
When I got pregnant with my oldest daughter, my husband and I weren’t married yet. I knew how hard pregnancy/parenthood could be on a relationship, and I was seriously frightened that it would destroy our relationship. Oh, I knew he was the type that still would have been there for the baby, provided financial support, etc. But I thought maybe ‘us’ as a couple might be finished.
We celebrated 22 years of marriage this past November, so obviously we weathered the storm, but yes, pregnancy and new parenthood is very stressful on a couple.
Obviously, I totally, 100% agree that it’s a stupid, stupid idea, but after my husband and I decided to work towards a baby I suddenly understood why the old “make a baby to save our love” thing seems rational to some people. I have a good marriage, and we made the choice after much careful discussion, but even so I was amazed at how baby-planning added a new dimension to our relationship. After over ten years together, I didn’t know there were new dimensions to find!
So I can really see how two people who wanted a bad relationship to work could use baby planning as a way to cover up all their incompatibilities. It’s obviously a very bad idea, but in the short run it could easily have a sedative effect on a rocky relationship and create a false sense of closeness.
This.
I knew I wanted to be a dad, but I had NO IDEA what it would really mean, how powerful my feelings for this little rascal are. I’ve never experienced a love like this. It completely bowls me over, all the time.
I would also like to mention how much time and attention young ones take up, and how wearying this is to parents, because kids have the attention span of gnats! Five minutes, tops. The reason they have so many toys is because you want them to sit down and play for a while, like kids are supposed to. And then the new toy is boring and out of favor. I was delighted when the kid played with toys, did fingerpainting, splashed in the kiddie pool, but it was only for a few minutes at a time and then it was ‘mom, mom,mom’ ‘whine whine whine’, you weren’t left alone for a minute. You could literally not have a conversation with another adult without being interrupted a dozen times. Your words, your thoughts, your activities were interrupted a hundred times a day…My favorite example of this was in an Elvis movie, where Elvis met The Girl, who was babysitting a little boy, in a park. The Girl puts the kid on a swing, and he sits there amusing himself for a full 15 minutes while she and Elvis have a long boring conversation. Finally, she says, “let’s go now, Timmy” and little Timmy gets off the swing and they walk away, hand in hand. If this was a REAL kid, he would be on the swing for 2 minutes, and then it would be: “Push me, PUSH ME”. “I’m hungry/thirsty/gotta go potty”. “When are we going? I wanna go to McDonalds. I wanna go for a walk. I wanna go see the ducks. Watch me! Watch me sing/dance/try to somersault/spin around like a lunatic!” The kid would run off toward the road/into the woods/toward a big strange dog. Sit in the sandbox throwing sand around/eating it/getting sand in his eyes. Head toward the monstrous high Big Kid’s slide. Wanting you to sit on the teeter totter with him. … No, unless he’s absolutely exhausted, that kid in the Elvis movie would never sit quietly on a swing for 15 minutes.