Having Kids is the F*cking Worst

Having kids is awful. Yes, it’s the best, most life-giving thing you can do with your time. But, it’s also a terrible quality of life choice.  Everyone is familiar with the A-side of having a baby. They’re cute, cuddly, forced to love you…it’s great. Suddenly your sham of a life has purpose and meaning.

The B-side of the coin is why we’re here today.

We’ve had zero uninterrupted nights of sleep since our baby was born just over a year ago. I’m contractually obligated to say her birth was the best day of my life. I don’t know why we have to say that. It was a rough day other than a new human was born. The actual moments after becoming a dad were AMAZING. I cried, I think. To be fair, we were all pretty sleep deprived at the time so I might have just been crying from exhaustion.

I wouldn’t want to repeat that day. It was definitely a milestone day. But, I didn’t even eat ice cream, so…best day ever?

Kids are the worst kind of Instagram model

Our daughter is the cutest baby of all-time and she’s mostly extremely agreeable. It’s still a never-ending shit show.

Here we are.

Pretty cute.

Here is where we live.

Chaos.

She thinks of herself first 100% of the time. She would do a higher percentage for herself if she could. If she’s playing happily and we attempt to put a diaper on her she goes into orbit. ORBIT.  Zero to sixty instantly. She has tremendous stamina. I’ve tried just waiting her out. Eventually, I just have to do the baby version of a hogtie to get the diaper on.

When I let her up she just goes about her day like nothing happened. Happy as a clam. She’ll smile, blabber, and hand me a green cup she’s holding as though we haven’t just been in a boss battle for the last five minutes. I don’t regret our decision to have kids, but let’s be honest, it’s often a shit time.

I feel like we have a well-behaved baby, all things considered. She’s happy, healthy, full of fat cheeks, and makes cute sounds with her face. She’s everything you could hope for when playing the baby lottery and she’s objectively adorable. I feel like I could be honest if my baby wasn’t cute by baby standards. But, come on…

…she’s super cute. I keep scrolling by this picture and it makes me want to pull punches and just talk about how great being a parent is. No! This is the B-side to parenthood. The A-side gets enough attention. I must ignore the cuteness and be blunt.

I don’t know how I would cope if our baby was less cute or less likable. There are ugly babies out there. I’ve seen them. I assume nature takes over and you just automatically love them but it would be hard.

My point is, she’s the best-case scenario when you’re rolling the dice on having kids. I love her so much I can’t stand it.

However…

Days like today—when we’ve been up most of the night because she’s half owl—make me question whether the whole thing is worth it.

Did nature trick us into a cycle of indentured servitude? Was I once a future traveler? Did I own a motorcycle? Have I showered this week? I contemplate such things while I lay helplessly on the bathroom floor.

Like so.

We used to sleep through the night no problem. We went on dates. I remember going to the coast and just hanging out watching the waves hit the shore. We went to bars, we saw friends, we stayed up till 11 pm. Once we went to sleep, we just stayed asleep until the next day. That was just what we did. Why did we have kids again?

WHY DOES ANYONE HAVE KIDS?!

What’s going on here? Why does each generation jump off the same waterless bridge? You can see people who don’t have kids frolicking around the fields. Care-f*cking-free. You can also see people with kids walking around like guard slaves in a zombie video game. It’s like gravity works double on them. Eyes, boobs, shoulders, all of these things sag tremendously when you have kids.

Hot Tip: Want to know what you'll look like after having kids? Imagine yourself, but melted. Just slightly melted. Maybe 10% melt. You're made of wax and then we stick you in a sauna for like 30 minutes. Congratulations, you look like a parent.

You lose 90% of who you are when you have a baby.

I’m sure it comes back as they grow into kids. I mean at some point you get to be you again, right? I used to play music and write songs whenever the mood struck. The Mrs. Burrito Bowl would knit with fervent regularity. We frequented a gym. I think we used to go on date nights and eat sushi. That was in the long-ago time. Now we spend most of our day trying to make sure a drunk, barely standing, one-year-old doesn’t find new and inventive ways to hurt herself. We fail every day. She’s very creative.

Is it worth it?

It’s hard to quantify worth because you’re weighing your free-time, autonomy, uninterrupted thoughts, cleanliness, dreams, and personal space being taken up 24/7 against the unrelenting cuteness of a real-life Baby Yoda. Obviously, I’m happy she exists and would be devastated if she suddenly didn’t exist, but it’s dishonest to only portray the Instagram worthy moments. I normally like being dishonest, but not here, dammit.

My wife and I have never fought so much as we have this last year. We still barely fight, but it’s more than before. I don’t like that. We have less sex because we’re both exhausted. We don’t have the energy to have deep meaningful conversations as often as before. Oh, and date nights? We haven’t gone on a  real date since the last time we got a good night of sleep. I believe the year was 2018.

I’m aware of this constant tension between just trying to get through the day and knowing these are the days I’ll look back on when I’m old. She won’t be tiny forever. Most of me loves this tiny stage she’s in. I want her to soak up all the moments of her being this sweet babbling insane person. One day she’ll be grown and I won’t get to poke her belly or scrub sweet potatoes off the floor, her hands, her hair, her nostrils, eyeballs, ears, etc.

Before I know it she’ll be in high school where her emotions will be much the same as today, but she’ll be much larger.

And not too long after that, she’ll be an actual person. Sometime around the year 2045.

Maybe she’ll be into photography or some activity that doesn’t really exist yet. She’ll have a whole life and we’ll be able to watch her make rational choices, sometimes. Maybe one day she’ll have a baby of her own.

I think it’s for sure worth it. It really does add a layer of meaning and happiness that I knew existed, but I hadn’t fully felt. But, it IS like getting drunk and signing up for a 10k race only to realize you clicked the wrong box and now have to run a 10k race every day.

I’m going to state the obvious but having a kid changes things.

It’s like you’re with someone because you think they’re just the best person you can reasonably hope to attract and then you have a kid and you both have to adapt. The qualities that you found so attractive might transfer over to being a great parent, or they might not.

It’s like picking an actor first and then rolling the dice to find out what type of movie they’ll star in.

They might be the life of the party but how good are they at changing diapers in the middle of the night? Do they get cranky without their full nine hours? Ha. Good luck. Are they willing to work all day then come home and immediately start doing the dishes because you’ve been with an insane screaming alarm clock all day and just need a few minutes to curl into the fetal position until the wave of this-is-my-life panic gently slips back into the ocean of exhaustion? Something to consider.

Having kids is not all bad, but a lot of it is bad. Your life is completely different than it was before. It’s not like you get to mostly do what you want but you have to also do some child-related things. Most of your time is now doing child-related things. Sometimes I do the dishes and think, “This is nice. This is a nice break.” Every once in a while the baby will fall asleep and you can relax for a bit.

During those times you can hazily type out an SOS letter and put it on the internet in the form of a blog post. That’s what’s happening now. My darling is catching up on her sleep since she was awake most of the night pretending to be a pterodactyl.

My point is, parents of part-time demon-possessed offspring, I see you. There’s this feeling that we have to be perfect and perfectly happy all the time. Nobody Instagrams the picture of them slamming their own head into the fridge door just to drown out the sounds of baby screams.

You’re doing great. You can do this. Hang in there. You’re not alone. Amen.

If you’re not in the new parent stage of life and wish to help, here are a few things you can do:

1. Reach out to new parents. Don’t expect them to reach out to you. There’s poop on the floor. They don’t have time to reach out.
2. Bring them food. It doesn’t have to be fancy. Costco pizza and whiskey are a great meal. Anything will do.
3. Offer to watch their offspring for a few hours while they sit and stare into the void silently convulsing on the couch.
4. Call them up in the middle of the night just to chat. When they answer, scream into the phone loudly. They have been trained to only respond to screams. Once coherent, begin chatting as normal. Sometimes a friend’s voice is a nice change of pace. They’ll be elated they don’t have to deal with a baby.

[Hears cries haunting the rafters]

I must go, I’m being summoned.

If you enjoyed this article please share it with people. The ones with young kids don’t have time to read it, but maybe they’ll bookmark it for some time in 2027.

Here are a few more articles you can read while you’re here.

On Swearing (Warning Explicit Content)

Choosing Family Over Finances Part III

On God Part III- What Happens in the Afterlife?