Midnight Pub

Parental instincts, I guess?

~aei

Good evening, I feel incredibly exhausted, going out of town tomorrow despite going out of town so many times these past couple months, but hopefully this will be the last one for a long time.

Recently, I have been thinking more about what having a child will be like. Not that I have any plans for it in the near future, but it is a thought I keep pondering on.

What would it feel like to have someone to care about? I guess the parents here may have an answer or something.

I know it won't be easy, I have had difficulties taking care of my siblings and that's tough already.

But I can't help but think how it would be like.

Honestly I'm not even imagining anything about the partner part, purely just thoughts of me and my child.

Not that I plan to be a single parent, I just don't seem interested in imagining a hypothetical partner as much as I am interested in what it would feel like to take care of someone.

Sometimes people around me don't feel their best, I get it, bad days come and whatnot. Usually I feel obligated to say something, something short or more frequently tall walls of text and/or long conversations. I can't help it but feel this is related to the wanting a child thing.

Anyways, away from this whole thing.

It's 1am and I do feel a bit tired. Maybe I'll go rest or have some dinner or whatever happens, so goodnight.

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~locha wrote (thread):

You probably have it in you. I did too, for all of my youth, despite being a man. In my late thirties, I went (by mistake) a storytelling event attended by toddlers, at some point, I had to leave because I was just bawling. But still, I was surprised by how intensely my daughter's birth affected me. One of the nurse told us "my and my partner, we love our kids a lot more than each other". Not something we like to say, and besides it's too different to be really comparable, but yeah. There is such a thing as falling in love, but I think it best applies to filial love.

I love when she comes in my room to wake me up, even if it's 6 am and I went to bed at 2. I love when she comes to get me insisting we play together, even if I have to cook or do some other chore. I love when she's quietly doing her thing, and I love when she's jumping around and singing loudly. I certainly don't mind rocking her for hours when it's necessary.

In philosophy, now that we have more women in the profession, there's a new concept tailor-made for the experience of having a child: transformative experience. And the hallmark is that, because it transforms you to the point that it reshapes your values and priorities, you cannot determine, from the perspective of someone who's before the transformation, if it's a good or a bad thing, because your counterfactual future selves have different sets of values.

That's how intense it is. We have to create a new moral concept to account for it.

So, from my perspective, having gone through the transformation, 100% worth it. But it took a huge toll on my sleep and energy, and forced me to do things that really don't fit with my other values (buy a house that I couldn't afford alone, take a corporate job that's not very fulfilling).