The crushing boredom of parenthood

Daniel Smith for The Atlantic:

When my first child was born, I discovered, as many new parents do, that my love for her was more profound than I could have anticipated. I had friends and relatives for whom I was willing to die. For my daughter, so visceral was my love, so instantaneous and complete, I knew I would kill.

That I loved my daughter was never in doubt. My problem was that I didn’t much like being a father. This came as a shock. I’d wanted a baby because I had taken such pleasure in life that I’d felt driven to expand the scope of existence itself. Experience was too wonderful to hoard, so I had a child. The irony was painful in that, seemingly overnight, the very things that most enlivened and sustained me—reading, watching movies, seeing friends, making love, sitting quietly by myself—were crowded out by a child whose needs absorbed nearly all of my energy and time. From a life of freedom and agency I had entered a life of constriction and tension, of white-noise machines, parenting manuals, and fatigue. …

My love for my child remained fierce. When she giggled, her throat pulsed like a bullfrog’s. On the street, strangers beamed at her round cheeks and blue eyes, and at me, happily implicated in her freshness. What a doting father! Look at him carrying his baby to the park, to the market, to the playground; tying a bonnet to her head; slathering her plump pink arms with organic sunblock. I cherished the vigilant and protective forces that radiated inside me.

But all of this rapturous gazing made up a terribly small fraction of the experience of being a parent. Much of the rest, as the months and years passed, consisted of nothing more than blunt, basic, run-of-the-mill boredom. The boredom of playgrounds. The boredom of picture books. The boredom of Cheerios, pasta, peanut butter, and Goldfish. The boredom, distilled and perfect, of the demand Again! Do it again, Daddy! Say it again! Play it again! Again, again, again, again, again, again!

With certain intimates, I could confess just how monotonous I found parenting to be. With other people, these disclosures would have been like admitting to drowning kittens or robbing liquor stores. Children, that great adventure, boring? The care and feeding of a human soul, tedious? I came to see my parental disposition as, at best, anachronistic and, at worst, deficient. I tried to pretend that I didn’t find the whole business alienatingly dull.