Parenthood

People say that I am a good father. It may be true, but it does not reflect any strength of character or personal virtue. Quite the opposite: it is a symptom of loss, of involuntary abandonment, transformation of the person I used to be. Every time I change a dirty nappy, or put Germolene on a grazed knee, or quarrel about who should pick up the kids this time, or serve tepid pasta at 6pm, a piece of me is lost. There is no less of me, but I am less myself. Every tiny sacrifice for the sake of domestic continuity is just that: a sacrifice. The laws of physics demand that such loss is replaced: entropy requires that what replaces it is more smoothed out, dissipated and disordered than what came before; and so it is, molecule by molecule, cell by cell... The result is parenthood incarnate, not the realization of some ideal social virtue, but a slow, largely painless, smothering of vitality and egotism. It is not that we change our priorities for our children, which might indeed be a virtuous impulse; rather, the priorities change us.
This insidious transformation is not without consolations, of course: there is probably nothing to equal the experience of seeing a child's first smile, first steps, their continual pleasure (for now at least!) in having you around, the feeling of watching them sleeping soundly. The principal consolation is that it provides an easy reason to live, to go on, a banal raison d'etre. Just because it's banal doesn't mean it's not true; just because it's true doesn't make it interesting. Parenthood is a pastime, like almost everything else in our existence, a distraction from our purpose, whatever that may be...
My friend Eric Kellerman told me before Sean was born that he was too selfish to have children. From anyone else, this should have been interpreted as mild self-deprecation; from him, it is only the truth, and he is right to believe it. What he can't know of course, is that everyone with a reasonably healthy mind is too selfish to have children; soon enough, though, like Winston Smith coming to love Big Brother, that selfishness slips away, leaving only a remembered trace in photographs, occasional rages, and passing flirtations. This may not be a bad thing—surely it is better to have the consolations of parenthood than to grow old without any achieving any other purpose—but it is sheer self-delusion to believe that it is an inherent good, or that it deserves any special reverence. To coin a phrase, "parenthood happens".