The Person You Were Before You Became Dad

There is a photograph somewhere on my phone from before I became a father. I am at dinner. It is late. There is no diaper bag under the table, no small cup of milk positioned dangerously close to the edge and no reason to know whether the restaurant has a high chair.

I look relaxed.

I also look vaguely unfamiliar.

This is one of the odd things about becoming a parent in adulthood. You have already spent decades constructing a person before somebody hands you a baby and gives you an entirely new identity.

Dad.

It arrives instantly.

The other parts of you do not disappear, exactly. They just become harder to locate.

This is especially true in the first years, when children require an extraordinary amount of physical attention. Your days become organized around feeding, sleeping, daycare, baths and locating very small shoes. Spontaneity, once an unremarkable feature of adulthood, becomes something requiring advance coordination.

Even your conversations change. You and your partner can begin an evening discussing politics, work or something you read and somehow find yourselves ten minutes later debating whether your daughter has eaten enough vegetables.

This is not necessarily a complaint.

There is tremendous pleasure in becoming someone's father. The identity feels substantial in a way few adult identities do. Jobs change. Cities change. Interests come and go. Dad is permanent.

But permanence can be consuming.

There is a version of parenthood that asks adults to accept this consumption as evidence they are doing it correctly. Your hobbies become harder to justify. Your clothes become purely practical. Trips revolve entirely around children. Friends without kids become harder to see. The things you used to care about begin to seem faintly indulgent compared with the serious work of raising a family.

I think this is a mistake.

Your daughter does not need you to become less of a person in order to become more of a father.

In fact, I suspect the opposite is true.

She should know that you have friends. She should see you care about your work, assuming you are fortunate enough to do work worth caring about. She should know that you exercise because it makes you feel good, that you read because you are interested in the world and that sometimes adults go to dinner without their children and return later.

She should see that loving another person deeply does not require dissolving into them.

This is easier to write than to practice.

Time becomes a moral question once you have a family. An hour spent doing something for yourself is an hour somebody else may be handling bedtime, cleaning the kitchen or answering a toddler's extremely urgent questions about where the moon went.

The answer cannot be that every individual desire deserves equal billing with family responsibility. Sometimes the run gets skipped. Sometimes the dinner gets declined. Sometimes the thing you would like to do loses to the thing your family needs you to do.

That is not losing yourself.

That is being a father.

The distinction, I think, is whether the compromise is conscious.

There is a difference between deciding that something matters less to you now and simply waking up several years later to discover you stopped doing everything that once made you interesting.

Maybe you run less but still run. Maybe restaurants happen at 5:30 now. Maybe travel involves a crib, an unreasonable number of snacks and returning to the hotel much earlier than you once considered dignified.

The activity changes because your life changed.

You are still there.

And there is something appealing about allowing your daughter to meet that person.

Someday she will know me not simply as Dad but as an adult man with interests, weaknesses, ambitions, friends, bad habits and a life that existed before hers. Eventually, if I am lucky, our relationship will expand beyond the basic work of taking care of her. We will talk about books, work, relationships and whatever else she decides matters.

I hope she likes the person she finds.

For now, she mostly knows that I make breakfast, go to work, know where certain things are stored and can reach objects she cannot.

That's enough.

But becoming her dad did not erase the person in the old photograph.

It made his life considerably less relaxing.

It also made it better.