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Everything changes. Thus echo the words spoken to me more times than I care to count during my wife’s first pregnancy. Enjoy your sleep. Get ready to give up your adult fun. Say goodbye to the relationship you have with your wife. These were just some of the tidbits of wisdom that came my way, but you get the basic idea: nothing would be the same come the birth of our first child.

And then, we had that baby. And yes, many things in our lives changed. Waking up early on weekends was no longer an occasional thing but a regular thing. Watching reruns of Law & Order immediately after dinner no longer happened. And yes, the time I spent with my wife did change. But my entire world was not destroyed by my daughter’s arrival; some things remain the same as they were before then.

Now, with my wife pregnant once again, I am hearing the same pearl of wisdom, albeit in a different manner. Now, parents with more than one child are telling me to enjoy my time with my daughter, that a family of four is vastly different from a family of three, that raising two kids is different than one.

Pardon me as I slip into a colloquialism for a moment: Well, duh.

Of course raising two kids is different than raising one. I know that we will no longer have one parent “free” while the other is busy with parental duties. I realize that the available time for playing with the first child gets reduced. My daughter will, once she gets over the whole “newness” of the baby, become jealous and resentful. I get it: adding a new person to the family changes the family.

But what I can’t understand is how parents can be so condescending about it. I remember being an expectant father and feeling so disrespected by the “Just you wait” and “You have no idea” and “You’ll understand soon enough”, so I would have hoped that parents of my generation would remember how they felt as expectant parents. However, it seems they did not.

The other thing is that most of them are focused on the negative. Sure, most of their tips open with excitement about the new arrival, but ultimately they spin towards the difficulties and the challenges. Why is that? What about all the positive things?

I remember the same things when in a prenatal class before my daughter’s birth: all the parents were worried or scared or nervous. Me? I was stoked. I could not stop grinning whenever I thought about being a dad. So, it should come as no surprise that I am equally (if not more, thanks to the infectious excitement of a preschooler) stoked for my second child to arrive. Instead of spending all my time worrying about how I’ll afford two kids, or how I will make sure both my children get equal attention, I’m thinking about the other stuff: the fact that my daughter will finally have a sibling, that she’ll no longer be the only kid in the house, the fun the four of us will have.

For those with kids: do you find yourself fixated on the negative changes that have come since your child was born? Do you envy parts of your pre-parent life? For those without kids: are you dreading the changes you face, or are you excited about it?

Tags: Baby, birth, change, Parenting