A Good Loss Of (Parental) Self

The parenting life suffers from many disadvantages: reduced hours of sleep, a severely compromised household budget, loss of intimacy with one’s partner, anxiety, the destruction of professional ambitions and drive, the list goes on (and on.) Still, parenting does offer one huge, off-setting benefit: a shitty day can be redeemed by your child’s good day. Or, in other words: on any given day, you can afford to fuck up, so long as your child does well.

The way this works is a familiar trope for most parents; you spend time with your child, engaged with him or her in one of many activities, physical or mental, each with their own learning curve, each possessed of their own particular developmental significance; you notice that during each enterprise, minor and major roadblocks occur, each threatening to derail your child’s onward and upward triumphal march toward greater maturity and accomplishment; you become accustomed to a kind of anxious holding of your breath as your child undertakes each activity; and then, as each is successfully surmounted, you figuratively exhale. In relief. And pride.  Perhaps it’s walking, perhaps it’s talking, perhaps it’s reading or riding a bike; no matter the task, the parent becomes invested, to varying degrees, in the successful ‘completion’ of each, in the successful attainment of each benchmark, real or imaginary.

And so it comes to be. Just as you revise–in response to your child’s presence in your life–your ‘table of values’ pertaining to intellectual and romantic and professional satisfaction and achievement in your lifetime, your notion of ‘a good life,’ a ‘life well lived,’ so do you revise–in response to your child’s onward progress in their life–your micro-and-daily sense of a ‘good day.’ Speaking for myself, a ‘useless’ academic day–which consists of little or no ‘heavy’ or ‘serious’ reading, few words written or drafted–can now be redeemed by the discovery that my daughter has read or written a humble word or two; those ‘minor’ increments seem far more significant than my usual pursuit of an ever-receding, ever-inaccessible intellectual ideal. A day on which I’m possessed of the usual middle-aged anxiety about physical performance or ability is quite easily salvaged by finding out that my ‘little girl’ has accomplished a physical task that seemed intractable until only recently. (For instance, this afternoon, my daughter succeeded in climbing a couple of routes that had thus far proven too difficult for her in our local climbing gym; the elation I experienced on witnessing her wave at me from the top of the climbing wall was a salutary antidote to my sense of physical disrepair following a couple of days of dietary disasters. My mood is still ebullient and will likely remain thus till tomorrow.)

These experiences speak to an ‘alarming’ loss of parental self, of course; but the idea of a wholly autonomous self is already risible for most parents; we are used to welcoming the collapse and implosion of many boundaries formerly held to be sacrosanct. Some losses are good ones.