Sometime in August last year, I became a dad, a whole 3 weeks ahead of schedule. Here are some notes, feelings, and thoughts from a year of being a baap; loosely grouped into themes.
IT’S OUT! Reactions to the new born
- Babies rarely arrive on time. It’s very understandable given that there are no calendars or watches inside the womb.
- Having a baby is a surreal experience. It likely triggers hundreds of little knobs mother nature has planted in you to keep our species going. When my wife was pregnant, the baby was just a concept. A few months later when I saw a scan showing a partially formed face and some fingers, my heart leapt. When my pink cranky blob of a baby was born, I was afraid. Afraid to death that I would do something wrong and fail to keep the baby alive.
- When the baby pops out, it looks semi-human. It is super pink, barely opens its eyes, and cannot eat normal food.
- The first few weeks are insane. Babies need to eat every 3 hours regardless of day or night or national holidays. You will be running on pure adrenalin.
- My baby triggered a perspective shift. We live our lives like the protagonist of a movie, pretending our actions and emotions are at the center of the universe (they’re not). Holding my little baby and taking care of it felt like the beginning of something new; a new character had emerged, a new movie had started in which I would be the supporting actor at best. It felt like a cosmic camera had found a new subject to focus on and a torch was being handed down. This perspective shift later manifests in your own behaviour. For example, who eats the sides/end loaves of the bread you buy? Or the slightly overripe fruit. In most places, it’s parents who eat those and let the kid eat the good parts. Guess what, it suddenly struck me that I’m the parent now and that I should be the one eating the sides or bad fruits or whatever so my kid can get the better stuff. I instinctively went “Oh no, I must eat this over-ripe banana so the baby can eat the good ones”. This did not happen with my wife; in fact I have noticed her eating the good fruits and leaving bad ones for me, turning the whole affair in a little competition :D (Wife’s note: Dear readers, my husband barely eats fruits - so he obviously doesn’t have “good” fruits left.)
- All attention and advice focuses on the birth/delivery process; it is the moment our culture and movies talk incessantly about; however from my experience; breastfeeding and managing the baby in the first 6 to 12 weeks is way harder.
Raising a baby
- Raising a baby is watching evolution happen with a personal stake; I’ve been amazed at my baby rolling over, taking her first step, saying her first words and more.
- Every few days you will think “My baby started X, is doing X normal?” and inevitably after some Google searches and reading Reddit threads you will discover that X is totally normal. Sleeping with hands raised? Normal. Farting like she ate 6 plates of chole bhature? Normal. Drawing a pentagram and hailing Satan? Normal.
- Parents are biased towards their babies, we see our kids with evolution-given love goggles, and have no way to objectively assess cuteness. This bias is healthy. Imagine if evolution hadn’t wired us that way and you felt stuck raising a baby you’re not quite pumped about. I truly think my baby is the cutest and very few babies compare.
- Genetics is a double edged sword; I was happy that my baby’s features indicated that she was going to be tall like me. I was unhappy when I noticed her hair was similar to mine (thin), and noticed some facial/dental patterns similar to mine (I have many dental issues). I felt like I had inflicted a little wound on my child. There is no fresh start.
- Prepare for memory loss. I feel like I was generally someone who could be organized and on top-of-things; spoons and forks in their own drawer sections, formal vs informal clothes segregated, etc. but with a baby in the mix this gets way more complicated. First you have less time through the demands of childcare, second you have lot more things (bottles, clothes, diapers, pediatric appointments, etc.), third, entrusted with the responsibility of life, you stop giving a fuck. So I’ve quietly submitted to chaos. Being organized feels like an aesthetic aspiration that is not worth losing my precious free time over. Haan fork chala gaya spoon section, kya hi hua usse? Oh yeah sorry, this paragraph was about memory loss!?
- Taking care of a child most deeply made me realise the importance of family, community and society. Separating people from their immediate family is an extremely recent phenomenon and it leads us to see ourselves as individual atomic consumers with little and unserious regard for the community and society at large. In the initial days, my wife and I ended up alone taking care of the baby and it felt wrong. We naturally needed support and felt woefully inadequate tackling this baby project alone. Luckily we did have some friends around and my in-laws did arrive later, but it felt nothing like the communities in Bombay that I grew up in.
- An immediate and mandatory exercise is for everyone to comment who the kid looks like! “oh she has dad’s nose”, or “she’s gone totally on mama”. These matches change based on the person observing the baby and also change as the baby grows. My wife felt dejected when initially people reported that the baby looks like me, while she had done all the hard work. Now the consensus is that baby resembles my wife entirely, she is quite pleased. That loss aside, the child has demonstrated great foresight by adopting my personality.
- Having a child raises life’s stakes. I always fear some drunk or distracted dude will run me over while I’m standing on the side-walk. Now my fears are doubled. “To love at all is to be vulnerable”, so we leave a little safety behind and go on an adventure of love.
- Through the process of child rearing you will discover that our modern lives are quite a departure from many natural inclinations. Emblematic of this is “sleep training”. No other species separates the child and the mother for the purpose of sleep; sleep training just uses the baby’s ability and need to sleep against itself by training the baby to sleep by itself (as opposed to with the mother as most humans and apes do). The hack works and is only executed because it will be impossible for nuclear families (and mostly mothers) to get sleep otherwise. All in the service of GDP growth!
- Continuing in that theme, it is crazy how child birth is the only life event for which we give people extended time off. That too is a modern phenomenon, here in US many mothers are back to their jobs within a few weeks! India has 26 weeks mandatory!
- Here in the US revealing the gender of the baby is not prohibited and we accidentally discovered the gender after a routine test. Watch out and alert your doctors, if you want to wait till the birth instead, else they will reveal it casually.
- Raising a baby without a car in the US is well nigh impossible. We have avoided buying one but the writing is on the wall.
- Brain Rules for Baby is a great book! Kids books in general are often bad. Just like with Enterprise software, here the buyer and user are different and the user is voiceless, unable to give feedback. In general, it seems like kids books have become a dumping ground for bad authors. The illustrations are always pretty, the stories and content are often random and meaningless.
Dreams and parental identity
- Even being a parent is just a phase and you don’t need to make it your whole identity or personality. But neither should you do the reverse and pretend that life can be the same.
- My goal with my baby is to enable a carefree artist’s life for her. There is a saying amongst Chinese immigrants that “The first generation sacrifices, the second generation studies, the third generation enjoys.”. I would like my child to go straight to generation three!
To become parents or remain DINKS?!
- My own conviction for having kids was neutral; I initially felt it’s the most natural thing to do. Later on, I flipped and felt why should I take a hit on my lifestyle. My wife too went back and forth on it due to the impact of a baby on career growth. I was never strongly opposed to the notion of having a child. Merely reluctant. So when my wife realized that she wants to be a mom - it became a hell yeah. On reflecting, I felt that some of reluctance stemmed from two things: A general scarcity mindset given my not so financially well off initial years and a lack of strong parental figures which made me lack a vision of a good family. Funnily, Namrata had the opposite journey. She had a modest inclination towards having a baby; and while my motivation was waning, hers was rising. I will let Namrata write her own blog post about how this happened; but the gist is that at some point she realized that she had been delaying her instinctual need to have a baby to focus on her career; and her career didn’t seem so fulfilling anymore.
- I got over my doubts by reminding myself that us homo sapiens have been reproducing during war, famine, riots, in surroundings far less comforting than mine and people with far less than me have babies too. I would be ok.
- Given my background and consequent mindset of scarcity/financial insecurity, I was worried most about the financial impact of being a parent. This worry was wrong to begin with because I had gotten decent paying jobs pretty early in life, it was just a hangover of my past. I now realize the time impact and mindset shift is the bigger change in my life. As a couple living abroad without immediate family, both of us have 8 hours each of work, sleep and childcare completing filling up our day. I am not a risk averse version of my former self, I am a new self with new values, that cares more about family and time spent with my wife and daughter, this manifests as caring less about career and risk aversion.
- I do think the time impact can be managed as well; kids need less and less from the parent as they get older and as the stereotype goes, teenagers are literally running from their parents. I don’t live at 100% efficiency (partially by design) and there’s always some slack you can tighten.
Societal stuff
- People today are not having babies as much as they used to. People have posited various reasons - costs of raising kids/living, more lifestyle choices, individualism, etc. All of these are likely somewhat true. Earlier people would have kids in their 20s, now people finish their career stuff, then marry and have kids in their 30s. But I can only say this, reproduction is the most natural thing, and an essential characteristic of life itself. While individual decisions to reproduce or not can have myriad reasons, not having enough babies as a society by definition means your country/community/region is going extinct. So prosperous optimistic societies will have and make it easy to have kids, while pessimistic societies will do the opposite. I think our world is still reeling from the transition away from agrarian lifestyles to industrialisation + modern medicine; which reduced the labour needed to live. Birth rates will likely keep dipping till most countries become like Japan and then we might see a climb in birth rates and finally stable population levels over the next few centuries as our species figures out a new balance.
- Women generally have to make a hard choice of career vs child rearing and it stems from a path dependence from where the current concept of work emerged. Britain industrializes in cities > Peasants from the rural areas move to cities and work > The factory becomes all consuming construct around which life of the masses gets centered > The factory mindset and concept of the sole male breadwinner get exported through colonialism and becomes the economic model for nations worldwide. I think this too will get sorted out as the alarm bells around birth rate collapse ring worldwide. We will have to change our economic patterns to make it possible for women to both participate in the economy while raising kids. Of course, it’s possible to achieve the same goals by going the route of The Handmaid’s Tale.
Name
Oh did I mention my baby’s name is Maya? or Maya Niyati Mendonca in full.
First name: Maya
To us the word represented universality. Namrata and I are two different cultures moving into a third culture. Maya as a name/concept is present in multiple cultures, and has different meanings across cultures.
Most relevant being:
- In Hinduism, our home culture, Maya stands for the illusion that humans perceive as reality. “Sab moh maya hai” is a related phrase that reminds us of the impermanent and illusory nature of life itself.
- In North America, the Maya were a civilization known for their beautiful art and majestic pyramids.
We felt the word Maya connected the two continents.
Second name: Niyati
We followed the tradition of adding a second name to incorporate both sides of the family. We wanted a name with N to continue maternal lineage (everyone on the Mom’s side has names starting with N). Niyati means destiny in Sanskrit. Niyat also means intention in Urdu. An intention is the most powerful thing an individual can possess, it is the seed before action and change. And it is also the opposite of fate/destiny. So her second name contains opposing concepts!
Surname: Mendonca
My surname originates from Portugal and means cold mountain. We did consider hyphenation in the surname to keep it fair, but “Kannan-Mendonca” felt unwieldy and annoying to fill forms with.
I don’t want to share photos of my baby in public yet, so here’s a Studio Ghibli version of what she looks like.
