A Dad's Lament
On being a parent, a writer and social isolation.
Note: I realize my Substack doesn’t have a nice clear direction yet, but the boy mentioned in this article is one reason. This is my writing outlet for now. Bear with me.
This winter break, I left my son and wife alone for the first time since he was born in order to go back to the States and participate in a few events related to the publication of my book, the Peril of Remembering Nice Things (Yes, shameless plug)
My son is 19 months old and still demands the effort equivalent to several full time jobs. He is the final success after ten years of miscarriages and IVF failures so my emotional attachment to him is also particularly sharp. It's like a knife in the stomach that so far has not cut a vital organ and so doctors are hesitating to remove it. It could cause a fatal wound if disturbed.
At Heathrow Airport, as I waited for my connecting flight, I made a video for him showing him all the big planes on the runway outside the waiting room window and sent it via Signal to my wife back in Istanbul. It's 6am and still far too early in the morning for either of them to be awake – as long as everything was going smoothly.
But what if it wasn't? I started to worry. What if my 2 am departure to the airport had woken him up and she was still struggling to get him back to sleep? I'd made lots of noise, brewing coffee, dragging the suitcase, calling to confirm the taxi. For the first time, I wouldn't be there to help the next morning. She was completely alone. The day could be chaos, the week…
I pace. I fret. I sit down and type into my phone, "Why is it hard being a parent?" The first thing that pops up is a response from Reddit.
I'm so sick of people complaining about how difficult being a parent is! I raised five children all on my own and was it sunshine and flowers the whole time? No. But I gritted my teeth and did my job.
Chastened, I sit back and feel randomly guilty. I look at all the parents milling competently about the waiting room and have a fleeting sense of inferiority, then bitterness. Why aren't they asking Reddit about parenting? Fuck all y'all, I think. Then feel bad.
There's a lot of chastening from unexpected corners when you are a new parent.
I recently listened to the latest episode of the fascinating podcast here on Substack. "Finding Home Elsewhere," where Keith Christiansen interviews various long term expats about their experiences living abroad. Artist Sandolore Sykes says that she spent her first few years in France feeling alone – a surprise considering the first year in a new country is often the most active and exciting. But she'd just had a baby, she explains, and "having a young child can be the most socially isolating experiences a person can have."
Yes!
Then I type in my parenting difficulty question into ChatGPT (just to be contrary), and it generates three pages of very specific and varied challenges without any judgement on the writer of the question. Social isolation is at the top of the list.
The constant chastising is one of the reasons for that isolation.
Yes, practically there are a lot of factors that make socializing difficult. You are physically exhausted. Going anywhere involves so much preparation – diaper bags and spare sets of clothes and snacks and bottles. Then, there are nap schedules to consider. Where will you be when the need for sleep hits?
But the participants in your social life, in other words, the people themselves can be an emotional drain.
Of course, a natural thing to do when getting together with friends or family is to commiserate. They ask "how's it going?" So you vent about what you're going through. But I swear it seems like no matter where my wife and I go or who we hang out with, we are either criticized or advised or judged, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly. We are rarely empathized with or just listened to, and so we regret venting, but since it so consumes our thoughts, we betray ourselves in talking about anything else. And it's all often well-meaning, so there's no solution really that doesn't lead to more social isolation. Either you don't hang out with people at all, or you point out that the things they are doing bother you, and so they get offended or put off and don't hang out with you any more.
For example, people can't stop advising us on how to dress our son. Don't you think he's cold? Shouldn't he have on another sweater? As if we put absolutely no thought into how to dress him before leaving the house, as if putting clothes on him is not an hour-long ordeal. Once a random woman in a supermarket bent down and asked our son, in our presence, if Mommy and Daddy forgot to give him a proper coat. My inlaws are especially bad about this.
Then there are the endless comments about what food we do or don't give him. One set of friends with kids check to make sure we are giving him absolutely no processed foods while my mother complains that we don't give him any sweets. Poor little guy never gets a treat! How draconian of us! But he doesn't like them. I tell her How many times have I had to clean up pieces of cookie or cake or pancake that he's spit out! She shakes her head, certain that I'm lying. The mean health-nut parents!
Worst is the judgement when we express any kind of frustration or weakness. That is where we are most vulnerable. I've lightly broached the subject of sleeplessness with friends – it's ravages on my work performance, on my day-to-day relationship with my wife, on our everyday quality of life. Two of my friends don't remember sleep ever being a problem. Another says, "I think we just wanted children so badly that we blocked out such minor problems." Another quips, "You'll survive." Others jump immediately to advice and worst case scenarios. I confess to a coworker one particularly rough week that I feel barely able to function physically much less deal with pointless teenage rebellion. I say my wife is feeling even worse. Have I considered the possibility of postpartum depression, he wants to know?
"My sister-in-law had it and for three years she was under heavy medication. Even fathers can experience it to some degree, you know."
Others make you feel like a whiner. One week when we rush our son to the emergency room in the middle of the night for breathing problems and for the next two weeks, have to attach him to a nebulizer three times a day which makes him cry inconsolably and he wakes up twice as much at night because he can't breathe for all the mucus in his lungs and we feel terribly for his suffering and but can barely function because we are sleeping not at all, I again make the mistake of confessing to a friend that I'm feeling a little on edge.
"I guess for us the baby being sick was never a big deal. We just gave her her medicine and got on with it. Everyone gets sick."
So I have stopped sharing anything with anyone. I am like a living Instagram account at this point, showing to the world only what they want to see. There are no flaws in the picture I present. It's all curated to not necessarily get likes, but to avoid negative comments.
For a while, my wife and I thought finding other couples with kids our age might be a solution. In specific, we were looking for more bilingual or bicultural couples in Istanbul. We spent a month searching online and asking friends and acquaintances, but nothing turned up. An appeal to a local foreign parents' WhatsApp group turned up not one answer to our appeal but instead a series of advertisements for the various members' businesses. Five messages, back to back about a new line of organic baby foods or a bilingual consulting service or website design.
Finally, a coworker said she had a friend with a toddler, but then later came back to me to explain that the friend said she valued her weekends too much and didn't really have the time to meet with anyone. You see, weekends were important as they were the only time the family got to spend together. Chastened again. We don't value our alone time together, apparently.
The message is always buck up or shut up or don't you love your children enough?
And so we have become socially isolated
The thing is, we have heard similar sentiments from random strangers in changing rooms at the mall. Brief little confessions between dirty diapers. Why we don't get those people's numbers, I don't know. It's happened a couple of times, but it's so quick and so unexpected we are caught off guard, and maybe empathy is only possible now in short anonymous spurts from strangers.