Time has once again proven why I don’t bother with their publication. Here’s a quote from the article in question:
Studies reveal that most married couples start out happy and then become progressively less satisfied over the course of their lives, becoming especially disconsolate when their children are in diapers and in adolescence, and returning to their initial levels of happiness only after their children have had the decency to grow up and go away. When the popular press invented a malady called “empty-nest syndrome,” it failed to mention that its primary symptom is a marked increase in smiling.
Time
OK, I’m not going to pretend that the wife and I don’t look forward to the day when the children are grown and out of our hair. But I’m also not going to share in the modern myth that you stop being a parent just because your children aren’t pestering you with “what’s for dinner” every night. Once you have ’em, you don’t get rid of ’em (if you do, it’s generally something they give lengthy prison sentences for) So I would highly recommend that people who don’t love children, not have children.
Yes, I am happy being a father. No, it’s not the bungee jumping ecstasy that is measurable through endorphins in the brain. It’s a lot like the question do you enjoy your work? Well, I don’t need to wear rubber lined underwear on the job, but I come back to do it every day anyway, if you get my drift. But then I’m weird like that; I actually enjoy doing housework, too.
Can parenting be tedious? Without question. Would I trade one moment of time with my children for anything else on the planet? Not on your life. You have to take the long view (something that is falling farther and farther out of favor these days) when observing things like parent/child interactions. The minute by minute chemical traces don’t capture what it means to see them born, learn to walk, learn to talk. Watch them go off to school, loose their teeth and grow them back; simply to change from the helpless tiny little things they start off being, to become people like…
…like you are. To know that, like your parents who nurtured you, you’ve added to the world in some small way yourself. You won’t find that recorded in the chemicals in my brain, but I assure you, it’s there all the same.
