If you’ve fathered kids across the blissful threshold, there is no mistaking it. And while crossing it is not an exact event, the awareness of existing on the other side of it is precise and unmistakable.
I turn 40 today.
Not that I timed up this post to publish on my birthday.
It just so happens that I turned 40 on the last Monday of the month, the day in my calendar on which I publish a blog post.
I’m averse to social media birthday celebrations, actually.
One of the first reasons I stopped using Facebook was all those birthday messages. It felt dehumanizing to receive so many messages, knowing that people got on their phones and were prompted to send me a message by Facebook. The experience was the opposite of connection. It felt like Facebook was capitalizing on the relationships—primarily the shorter-lived ones—that I’ve built over time. It was an alienating, not an uplifting experience. I knew I wasn’t seeing how much people cared about me, but rather seeing how many people say happy birthday when prompted to. We experiment on rats in a less degrading fashion.
The thought of spending my birthday reading those messages became distasteful, and it led to my thinking the same of all experiences of the app. It is designed to make you want to get as many birthday messages as possible, for example. How do you do that? Send a birthday message to others when prompted. What a bizarre feedback loop of half-hearted gestures.
This is one of many experiences I do not want to carry into my next decade on this earth. I’ve been projecting a lot lately about what I do want my next decade to look like.
There is a threshold in parenting. I’ve experienced it once so far. Call it the Age of Bliss.
Picture this. After years of housing incessant domestic disturbances, from the sleeplessness of newborns to the tantrums of toddlerhood, your home becomes quiet again. The kids entertain themselves. And what’s more, their entertainment doesn’t necessitate either tearing the house apart or sitting in front of a tablet. I’m talking about the age of true peace. When your quiet time includes their tearing apart the house, your mind is always on one of two things: the work you will have to do later to clean up and the lack of discipline that allowed this behavior in the first place. The quiet that comes from their staring at the screens fills your mind with all the customary guilt that comes with such parental negligence.
During this time period with my older two kids, I had to wake up hours before dawn to have some quiet thoughts.
Then we crossed the threshold. All of a sudden, seemingly out of nowhere, I could sit and write for a couple of hours undisturbed. Or I could read a book without my thoughts drifting to the commotion of chaotic play or the noisy entertainment of screens.
It was total bliss. I could read all day if I were so inclined. Of course, this blissful stage quickly turns into untold busyness, a phase of parenting in which the kids develop commitments to sports and activities that requires your role of circus master to morph into personal chauffeur and amateur talent manager. But the busy phase is rooted in quiet, whereas the earlier phase is rooted in chaos, demoralizing in its unremitting persistence. Your peace of mind becomes portable. You take it with you to soccer practice or gymnastics lessons and park it outside.
Your identity—what it means to be you—your personality—the confidence which made you want to multiply a part of yourself in the form of new human beings in the first place returns gradually. You get back to that creative hobby which mad you so happy in your 20s. Maybe the romance between you and your wife sparks once more.
It feels really good to be on the other side of that bliss threshold. I found that the newfound quiet—after enduring those noisiest of years—was the best kind of quiet. Rest is always better when it comes after a job well done.
Then we had our third child.
At the poker table, I explain to friends that having a third child is like re-setting the timer. My friends who are fathers tend to understand this analogy without an explanation. If you’ve fathered kids across the blissful threshold, there is no mistaking it. And while crossing it is not an exact event, the awareness of existing on the other side of it is precise and unmistakable. Choosing to have another child re-sets how long it will take to return to that bliss.
We re-set the timer with our third child, stood on the side of bliss and opted to return to the chaos. And I am so glad we did. Bliss isn’t everything, after all. Somehow it felt right to do it. If parenting is a hero’s journey, we vanquished the dragon and chose to return home to restore order. (That is an underrepresented phase in modern storytelling. My son and I sat down to a Lord of the Rings movie marathon this summer because we finished reading all the books—now THAT is a phase of parenting I have settled into with ease. We couldn’t believe that the movie skipped the final chapters in which the hobbits return home to find that ruffians control the shire. While the hobbits follow a perfect hero cycle in the book, the films skip the last all-important step, the one which the heroes restore the shire.)
We call our little ruffian the nugget.
She is outgoing and adventuresome.
She stops to tell passing strangers what she is up to and asks other three-year-olds to be her friend at the playground. Parenting her is a rapturous undertaking. But it is also an infuriating experience. Our home life is anything but bliss.
She never idles. Unless you follow her every step and correct her every action, she will spin through the house like a tornado, coloring the walls, letting the dog out of the front door, pouring herself milk, dropping the carton on the floor, taking out every piece of clothing she has to find the one pair of underwear with Elsa’s face on it, gluing construction paper onto the table, foraging for something sweet in the cupboard, all while flicking every switch and pressing every button on her twirl through the house.
And here we are, almost across the threshold once more. She no longer wears diapers. She is starting to show signs of sustained imaginative play, a sort that doesn’t require the complete overthrow of our shire.
She can stay in the seat of her balance bike down big hills. I remember when my older daughter learned to ride a bike. I no longer had to haul her around in the trailer. It was a key indicator that the age of bliss was nearly upon us. And now it is nearly upon us once more.
And I am 40 years old.
Ten years in on the parenting journey.
There are many other phases ahead, and I know that when I mention this to anyone outside of my poker-table friends, I am told that I will miss these days. That may be the case. So let’s compromise and say that I am really really looking forward to those days when these days are the days I get to miss while I sit in the quiet solitude of my thoughts once more, safe again across that blissful threshold.
