It is important for me to talk carefully about paternity at parties. That is, I think, because I have always found part of my self -realization in talking to others. Only in conversation with others will I find out who I really am. Only there can I bring simmering feelings to complete thoughts and insights.
It may have to do with family gatherings from the past, where the Zeeland branch was neatly in a circle and never seemed to speak about the things that really mattered, such as why an uncle and two aunts committed suicide in the 1980s. I have never had it like that, and I think I have started talking so pleasantly about the lives of others and myself, without concealing the heavy or difficult.
Since I am a father, I notice that it is no longer possible for me. The process was always: asking many questions to the people around me to ensure that they felt and heard themselves, and then to be able to talk to them at level about the important things in our lives. That way I could also lose my own egg and I learned something from someone else. By -catch was that people found me sympathetic and friendly because I was so interested in them.
But now that I have a child, it stops. How is that?
One of the answers is that it is due to the lack of time. I visit parties less and when I visit them, I visit them shorter. If you are in a company for four or five hours, you have plenty of time to look for someone with whom it is interesting, while I have to do it now with one and a half to two hours (it is nice when I get home on time.)
At the same time, those one and a half to two hours push me more with my nose on the facts, and those facts are that I don’t know how to answer the question ‘how it goes’.
The problem lies mainly in the desire to be true. What is true, in my situation? What I have been starting for a year now is how little we sleep and how much the little man initially pooped. But soon I also noticed how faint and not sufficient that was, and how unreal it felt in a certain way.
Photo Ein Carey
I now scisses these kinds of stories under the heading ‘But you get so much in return’, which seems to be the annoying ironic basic attitude in the Netherlands to talk about children. Fatigue, diapers, lack of time, no more sex life, household in pure chaos: you know that sigh not only from others at parties, you also know them from social media posts. Especially on Instagram, people too often come ‘honestly’ how heavy parenting is. Chef Special singer Joshua Nolet last did it in one viral video In which he is pale of sleep deprivation in the picture with his young children and in a voice-over tells how little they are sleeping, that they are ‘broken’, and at the end the image turns to the right, where his partner overs the tractor of the imaginary pistol that stands against her sleep. This may sound grim than it is; The video is still quite a friendly, candid look in the lives of parents of young children.
And although these kinds of messages still seem to be a reaction to the sugar sweetness with which traditional parental media (and certainly also the commercials) prevent it, this frankness has since become so commonplace that it feels clichéd.
Yet the temptation to seize it in conversations is enormous. Not only do you have little time, but your audience is often not willing to go all the way to you journeyyour truth In discussing the joys of love for your child, and then the choice for a witty anecdote about how your child performed it quickly made his back up.
I want to say something about what it feels like to be responsible
But how, how, do you discuss those pleasures? How do you catch something of the mystery of deep love, the deep joy of parenthood in a short time, in the form of an anecdote or confession?
I once told about the time my beloved put a ‘bread pudding’ on the table, which is actually a ridiculously big muffin from the baker around the corner, and that our child got the weak smile.
I told about the time our child just learned to work on walls and chairs, and that I arrived at the daycare center and that he had moved to another boy there that stood at Ikea’s playing kitchen, making it seemed like they were a loving couple who was cooking together.
But it remains with sweet or witty images, and although listeners can absolutely laugh about it, although something of love is seeping in, it still feels removed from the supreme truth that I would like to be able to convey.
Shortly after I heard that my partner was expecting, I walked through the city, a little bit with my soul under my arm. I thought of calling an old high school friend, someone I thought I could always call him, because we would always remain friends. I wanted to test that – also because he has a child a few years old. He took a happy, asked how it went, and I said I wanted to ask if we were still friends, and that I wanted to tell me that I would become a father.
“Yooo, super fun!”, He said, and I asked him what it was like, parenthood, and he told that it was really super, Súper fun, and that all his meaning problems had also disappeared, and despite the confirmation of the friendship a small sting in my heart: I don’t want to saddle my child at all with my own meaning problems.
Photo Ein Carey
I would like to appreciate the child for who he is, but not for what he means to me. I do not know how to explain this further – I am too tired for that – but I think it is one of the things that stand in the way if you want to talk about your own children. It is that a child gives your life more sense, but you don’t have to say that out loud, I think.
I want to say something about what it feels like to be responsible, or how the fear of death has not been gone since I have been a father, but changed. Sometimes I think just before falling asleep about the fact that my fear of death has not necessarily disappeared now, but has become more mature, more mature – not that I now have peace with dying, but that I can ‘do’ more in life in a certain way, because there is more at stake. The whole thing matters more. But such things are more difficult to articulate in a casual conversation if your conversation partner would rather talk about politics or the weather.
I recently told, also a bit of surprise of myself, how strange it feels that I now have someone in the house who says everything he hears me compares with what I finally do. I felt that my ability to present myself ‘as new’ had been taken. In short, I said that my fears about my own moral defects were now bigger and stronger than ever, because those defects were more important than ever: they served to instructions for a new person.
Photo Ein Carey
To my own feeling, I suddenly encountered a truth, the kind of truth that I like to look for in conversation with others. But in the eyes of my hearing, I now saw astonishment and aversion rather than recognition.
Especially with one other boy I saw the fear in the eyes. His girlfriend, also present, was pregnant with twins, and I suspect that he had not thought about this yet, which made it somewhat precarious and strange, as if I had talked my mouth past.
I read the book around the time I became a father Patent language (2024) of the Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra. He investigates on the basis of diary entries from when his son was born, poems, memories of his own father and pieces of fiction about football and fathers and sons how a person should talk about paternity, or at least I read that. He appeals to the clichés in which people fall (including himself) and writes about the desire to fill in paternity with lucidity, humor and humility.
Humidity, lucidity, humor – that seems like something to me. Reading Zambra I realize: how you talk about things matters. Someone who writes about paternity in such a way as he can hardly be a bad father.
The (starting) paternity is worrying, changing diapers, laughing a lot, endlessly lifting and putting it down, reading endless booklets and endlessly that cannot be caught – and it is precisely the search, very carefully to grab the right loving words, seems to me a good way to display the complexity of that experience.
In that sense, every attempt is to say the right things over Fatherhood an exercise in paternity. One day I am no longer talking about him but against him, and then it must be the right words.