Oh, shit, just gonna answer the OP with a link or two.
No, I want a few words as well. Sorry for being a liar two sentences ago:
It’s the 24/7/365/18+ years non-stop nature of parenting that non-parents don’t really get. For 18 years and 10 months, until this past August, I knew where my daughter was every second of every day, at the very least in general terms (Sophia is with Katie’s family) but mostly specific (Sophia is with her mother/@ school).
And I do not know of any other person in my life to whom I could make the same claim for in a random 72 hour stretch, much less 18 years. I guess my then-wife, at those rare times when we had just one car? ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Then there’s this:
When Sophia went to St Johns she was faced with 2 weeks of quarantine, coming in from Texas as she was. So I compiled a list of my more important posts and threads about her, wrote her an open letter, and posted it here, sending it to her so she’d have something to read during qtine.
In the above thread you will find links to, IIRC, over 50 threads and posts about her, about being her father, and about some of the issues I wanted help from this community on (usually regarding education).
More to the question posed by the OP, I offer this thread, Thoughts Upon My Daughter’s First Month, specifically this quote:
… and the minutes were, and are still, being cherished. And she still is the most interesting person on Earth. And I still feel that excited about Sophia, that full of hope about the promise she brings, but even more so now that I know her gifts and strengths. And she has a lot.
Having been both a non-parent and a parent (and Sophia wasn’t born until I was 34, so I had plenty of adulthood being a non-parent), I can safely attest to the truth of the statement that there are aspects to being a parent that a non-parent cannot understand.
I do hope the above words and links help in understanding this.
JT