My daughter

I just had my first child. Before she was born, I spent a lot of time thinking about what it would be like, how I would feel, what would change. But little of the real changes did I anticipate. Even the ones that I did kinda get right still feel like my anticipation of them was importantly wrong, and I really had no idea what I was getting into.

Obviously, I anticipated being madly in love. Before her, I was madly in love with many people: my partner, my family, my friends. This type of love, for me, isn’t constant. I can viscerally feel it when I focus on one of my loved ones. It surfaces in my choices, where my thoughts go, how I react – but it’s not there all of the time. With my daughter, it is constant. It’s like – something changed, and now I have this persistent process in the back of my mind. It’s a softer, less intense, a more constant love. I’m not going to do a good job of describing it here. But for me at least, it’s different.

That love hasn’t come for free. Accompanying it is an equally constant fear of her death. It’s not particularly rational (but look at those little hands! she surely needs infinite protection? her fragile toes can’t survive this cruel world.). I’ve thought about the death of my loved ones before, and sometimes I do get teary about it, but it’s never a truly scary thought. I always think: I’d get through it. But with my daughter, her death feels like it would be so totalising, so consuming, that it would define my life. It feels unthinkable that the world would do this to me, give me such a burden for the rest of my life, to have someone out there whose threat of death constantly weighs on me. I don’t want this fear to drive how I raise her, but I think the solution won’t be to get over it, but to counterbalance it.

All of this change – the introduction of constant love and fear – has also thrown into confusion some stuff I weakly believed about population ethics. I like that longtermism puts weight on future generations, it feels important to preserve our world for the unborn. But I also bought that those unborn people carried moral patienthood beyond just making sure we don’t mess things up for them, that they deserve to live and we should make sure they exist. I feel much more confused about this now. I was excited to have a daughter, and to some extent loved her before she was born or even conceived. But that love was a much more shallow love, a more abstract feeling, than now. I think she gained moral patienthood much later in the process. I like to have my views on morality be grounded in things I can viscerally feel, and this experience has thrown into doubt how much I viscerally feel about future generations. I’m a lot more uncertain about this aspect of longtermism now.

One last thing is how I relate to people who haven’t had children, who are thinking about whether it’s right for them. I anticipated becoming a bit annoying, and telling people how incredible parenthood is, what a joy it is to bring life into this world, etc… But I think I’ve actually gone the other way. We’ve had some pretty sleep deprived stints so far, thanks to some overnight hospital trips. They were tough. Nothing very bad, mind, but a lot of work. During these times, I did feel dread: oh god, what have I done, this is my life now, there’s no way out anymore. I slept a bit, and this went away. I’m certain it’ll come back occasionally, but I’m not worried about it. But the feeling of being trapped in this completely new and lower quality of life is intense, and if you don’t have the joys of parenthood to balance it out, I can imagine it dominating your existence. I would still love more of my friends to have children, but I’m much less confident they would enjoy it if they did.

All that’s to say: parenthood has much more colour to it than I expected. I’m very happy.