A few months ago I had the immense blessing of a baby daughter coming into my life. Creating a new life, seeing her fresh out of the womb, and watching her begin to take in the world around her—having a child is the one common opportunity in life to experience a true miracle. There’s no way to really describe it. It’s a perception shift, probably a unique one in the human experience. For a lot of my life I thought I could never have children and felt that I wouldn’t particularly want them anyways. Now that I’m here, I can say that perhaps nothing else has affirmed my faith so much as this.

This article isn’t going to be about religion or why you should have children, though, at least not primarily. Don’t worry, I’m sure I will write more about that in the future! What I want to focus on here is the actual experience of having—and then raising—a child. You can find a gazillion posts about why you should or shouldn’t have children, or about pro-natalism and birth rates, all of these things that talk about kids in the abstract. I am now fortunate enough to actually have one, right here with me, my very own, so I want to focus on a series of articles telling people what being a parent is actually like.

I think this is an important angle to present alongside all of the bigger-picture stuff. If we want to foster a culture of parenthood, one necessary aspect of that is for child-rearing to be a social experience—that means parents talking to each other about their parenting experiences and also presenting those experiences publicly for the childless to see and interact with. As soon as you touch the topic of having kids people will jump to all sorts of conclusions and activate all sorts of agendas and hangups and assumptions. I have the opportunity to sweep aside all of the coping and theorizing and actually do the thing, then report back to you on what’s true and what isn’t.

I think there’s a good case that such content will be more valuable than the politislop that I’ve been writing about. I don’t plan to abandon politislop, not by any means, but at the end of the day you can just turn off the computer and go through life completely ignorant of the latest right-wing Xitter discourse and be completely fine. Parenthood on the other hand is much more essential to people’s real lives for obvious reasons. Depending on how things go, I may paywall some of these posts. I definitely want the politislop to remain free, and I’m not in any big hurry to monetize, but this is my first thought of some sort of actual value that I could offer to paid subs. That’s something for the future though.

For now, I want to recount the basic story of my child’s birth and what it’s been like to live with her so far. Our child was born via C-section, thankfully the operation went smoothly with no significant complications, so we were out of the hospital in three days. Still, I will say that the three days in the hospital were easily my least favorite three days of being a parent. It’s cramped, there’s no privacy, you’re stuck eating hospital food, and probably the worst thing is trying to get any sleep. In our hospital they had some janky setup where the back cushion of the long couch on one end of the room would fold up and over the seats and that was supposed to be a “bed.”

It was not comfortable at all and, between that and the fact that nurses have to come in and out of the room for random reasons constantly, I didn’t sleep and that made me quite cranky. It doesn’t really matter what else is going on in life, it’s hard to enjoy it when you’re sleep-deprived. Trying to learn all the basics of baby care is also not great when you haven’t been sleeping. Unfortunately, since my wife had the C-section, we probably couldn’t have gotten out of the hospital any faster than we did. If you’re having a kid, that’s my first piece of advice—brace yourself that the hospital stay is gonna suck.

Fortunately the hospital stay, however much it sucks, is still only a few days and then you’re home free. A few days of crappiness is not a big price to pay in the grand scheme of things. Once we got home, it felt like we were now actually taking care of our baby for the first time, as the nurses had probably done over half of the care while we were in the hospital (which we were both fine with). Since my wife was still recovering from surgery (to her great credit, she could pretty much take care of herself already), it fell to me to essentially be baby’s primary caregiver for the time being.

I think the biggest threat looming over anyone looking to become a parent is that of sleepless nights, which I’d already had a taste of in the hospital. To be sure, you will be up multiple times during the night when baby is still fresh out of the maternity ward, but this can be managed pretty effectively as long as you have at least two people to tackle it together. Naturally this would just be mommy and daddy, but since for us mommy was out of commission at first, my mother-in-law came and stayed with us for a bit to help.

I did have some nights taking care of baby all by myself during that first month and, while it’s not ideal, it is still quite doable if your baby’s sleep patterns are like ours. I’m not sure if there’s really any good data out there on aggregate infant sleep habits, but given everything that I’ve read and absorbed, I think I’ve been blessed with a relatively “easy” baby. Since the sleep issue is probably the #1 concern of most new parents, and was indeed also my primary worry, post #2 in this series will be dedicated to that. For now, I will say that having an extended family member over to help for the very beginning was a great blessing.

The first couple of weeks to a month is probably the biggest transition in life that most people will go through. I’m not sure what else is a bigger life adjustment that happens with so much, all at once. Maybe people who commit major crimes and then get caught and go to jail? I don’t think it’s fair to include that as something that the average person would go through, though. I’ve been in relationships, gone to college, gotten married, blah blah blah—coming home with a baby is a bigger change than any of those, and maybe more than all of them put together.

At the very start baby needs to be fed every 2-3 hours, you’ll also be changing their diaper frequently during those times, if you’re really on your parenting game you’ll walk around with them a bit in between, and then on top of that now you’re supposed to give them baths too. That’s just the daily routine, without touching anything else that might come up. It’s not an exaggeration to say that if you’re the sole caregiver for a newborn, at least half your waking hours will probably be spent on that, possibly more. Once again, being able to work as a team makes a big difference here. In our case, we were very fortunate in that both myself and my wife have been able to stay at home with our baby full time.

However, even if one parent is still at work all day, if just one is able to stay home and focus on baby, it’s very much something you can handle if you’re approaching it as your “job” for the time being. I would prefer taking care of my baby over sitting in an office any day of the week, no questions asked. This is where I want to address something that I feel is a bit of a myth about babies and becoming a parent. I might be reading things wrong, but it seems to me that there are a great deal of negative assumptions made about how difficult and upsetting childcare is.

After all, if this were not the case—if people were just falling over themselves to have babies all the time—then we wouldn’t have all this dialogue about birth rates and cat ladies and etc., would we? From what I have observed, a large segment of the population—and I get the sense that it’s mostly women, although there may be a selection effect there because it may simply be that it’s only the women who are loud about it, but anyways—my sense is that a large segment of the population believes that taking care of a baby really sucks, that they won’t want to do it and that it will basically be more “work” on top of everything else in life, and that is why they do not want to have one.

In my experience, this is not true at all. I have had far more fun taking care of my baby than I’ve ever had at any job. You don’t know just how ridiculous a small baby is until you really have one for yourself. You will not find another person more consistently entertaining than your infant. When I’m feeding her (she is entirely bottle-fed, partially due to the C-section), she constantly gives me a suspicious side-eye, like she’s enforcing her dominance in the interaction. At first when I put her on the changing table, she liked to practice stretching her legs by pulling them up to her chest so that she looked like a frog, then shooting them out straight as hard as she could.

Even when she was newly born she spent basically every waking minute making weird faces, which were often complemented by vigorous wiggling sessions, and that was before she started smiling. She’s only a few months old and her range of behavior has already expanded dramatically, which is thrilling to watch. Now she is very vocal, making a range of squeaks and gurgles that are both hilarious and impossible to imitate (though my wife and I have tried). She regularly smiles at people who come into her field of view, often accompanied by those same silly vocalizations, as if she’s trying to talk to you.

And yes, she does cry a lot, but even her crying is adorable and entertaining—it’s often preceded by an incredibly cute pouting face, and my wife and I find a lot of humor in the inherently absurd nature of this little person who has to completely crash out whenever she gets hungry, joking that if she could, she would surely rate our food delivery service as zero stars on baby Yelp. I could go on for quite some length at all of the ways she has made me laugh and smile, and I think one of the future posts in this series will be dedicated to that. It’s not just that she’s a ton of fun, either, it’s also that she keeps changing so fast, doing something new and funny on what feels like a daily basis.

In summary, my experience is that yes, taking care of your baby is “work” in a sense, but unless you have a particularly bad attitude or perhaps a particularly “difficult” baby (obviously, my sample size is only one for now) it is absolutely not “work” in the same sense as any other work that you ever do in life. Everything else that I have done in life which could be classified as “work,” I have basically done because I felt that I had to—because, y’know, the rent isn’t going to pay itself. Having a baby is the first “work” I’ve ever done purely because I wanted to, and the only “work” I’ve ever done that felt like it had any real purpose beyond just keeping the lights on.

What’s great about this is that it’s something entirely within the scope of an average person’s life. Up until two seconds ago, the vast majority of us got to experience this just as I have, even if perhaps some people didn’t have quite as much fun with it as I’m having. But based on what I’ve gone through so far, I see very little reason why anyone who has their life together on a basic level can’t or shouldn’t go on this incredible adventure, just like me. If an autistic retard like me can do it, the rest of you really don’t have much excuse. And if you’re reading this, you’ll have me going ahead of you to try and map out a path.