9. Is parenting boring?
A question has been going around in my head for a few weeks: is parenting boring?
We’re nine months in now and he’s very fun at the moment. The question got into my head from an article in The Atlantic entitled Boredom is the Price We Pay for Meaning. The author, Daniel Smith, writes that while he loved being a father, he found much of parenting boring.
Instinctively I reacted thinking ‘I’m not finding it boring’, but also feeling that the answer was a little more nuanced and layered than glibly saying it’s all wonderful. It just isn’t. The experience is really varied, from day to day and sometimes even from one minute to the next.
The positive side is the joy, the love, the wonder of seeing and facilitating their rapid development. There’s a huge upside when you start getting reactions and responses, marking the start of something you can more authentically describe as a relationship than the total dependency of the first few months. There are so many places you can go and read about the unbridled joy of it all that you don’t need me to go further into the good stuff.
Exploring the negative side of it is what’s been occupying my thoughts. It’s often frustrating, tedious and repetitive. It’s also a massive thief of time and your own agency. He’s recently developed a game where he sits in his inflatable ring and picks up a ball from it and throws them out at you, who catches it and throws it back into the ring. Every throw and every ball coming back at him elicits lots of laughter. It’s mostly really cute and endearing, but a long session of it when you were hoping he’d sleep so you can tackle your to-do list of housework can be really tedious.
There is a huge amount of repetition in the care of an infant: changing nappies, making bottles, washing bottles, sterilising bottles, constant inventory checking of nappies, formula, wipes, dressing him, changing his clothes when they’re dirty, following him round to prevent wobbly steps turning into dangerous falls. The amount of cleaning up after meals can get tedious, and the volume of laundry remains stubbornly high – fewer nappy accidents and a bit less drooling offered the prospect of the load reducing, and then feeding jumped in to multiply it once more. So many little actions you do again and again and again.
The weight of fatigue can also colour your feelings. With the day starting early he’s often awake and out of his cot before 7am. Thirteen hours later – during which time he’s had several long naps and you have been awake continuously – he might well be fighting sleep. Fighting not with light resistance but with the force and intensity of a cage fighter. His energy, his jumps, his crawling and standing which you usually love become something different as you grapple him, wishing you could swap places and become the one being encouraged and facilitated into a 12-hour uninterrupted sleep.
Are these nightly battles boring? Is doing yet another load of laundry boring? Boring implies a lack of any interest in something. I think of repetitive parts of cooking and whether these are boring. I must have made a thousand salad dressings in my life. I alternate between a mode of efficient consistency – getting a great dressing ready in moments with minimal mess – and a mode of experimentation – creating a great new dressing out of what I have or for the specific salad in front of me. It keeps it interesting, and of course while the dressing is the output of the task, the outcome of it is a delicious dish for you and maybe some happy guests too.
I find something of the same approach helps manage the repetitive tasks of parenting – finding the efficiency of preparation and movement so you can undress him, take off a nappy, bathe him, dress him and clean up the bathroom afterwards all largely one-handed as the other hand restrains him in the constant grapple for his right to roam.
The past three months of feeding him has created a new point of interest that pushes any prospect of boredom further away. I will soon post in more detail about the feeding routines we’ve developed. The interest comes from the happy intersection of things which are interesting to me as a cook and good for him in a nutrition and development sense. We’re currently on holiday in a house with lots of chickens in the garden providing daily fresh eggs. His normal London breakfast of banana porridge has been swapped out for a daily egg, rotating through supplements of tomato, garlicky spinach, broccoli, mozzarella, beans and smoked pimenton. Introducing him to more flavours also creates a fun little cooking moment for me. Seeing his growing enjoyment of food and constantly improving skills creates more than enough interest to block out any tedium that the constant wiping and sweeping the floor brings.
These small moments weave together into a bigger truth about these first nine months of parenting. The loss of your own agency is unavoidable and so rather than fight that I’ve tried to spin it around into a positive: going with the flow. How you spend your time is going to be determined by his sleeping and eating patterns. While a rough schedule exists, it’s still quite unpredictable, particularly the timing of daytime naps. To make this work I’ve radically scaled back how much I attempt to do – taking a partial career break had removed time pressure in a major way. But even with this I had to go further in jettisoning intentions and ambitions for my time. A good day is one where the baby is happy, well fed and rested, we as parents eat good food, and the house is in a pretty good state of order. Making this feel satisfying stops the focus being on the things I’m not now doing as much as I used to, and makes anything we achieve on top of this – a lunch out, getting to watch a series, a good hour’s reading – feel like a bonus.
During this current holiday, getting two good hours on the beach where he is happy throughout is a major win. This is a big change from the pre-child days where I could arrive at one of these beaches at 2pm and still be happily there at 9. In the space of what’s been left behind has come the fun of seeing him happy and embracing the freedom of a holiday, even if the switch to the Spanish lifestyle has caused a few rough evenings of grappling a tired but sleep resistant child to bed. I’ve completed one book and am halfway through another – a far cry from the days where I might get through four or five comfortably.
In the article which started my thinking about this, the writer concludes: “The only true way to endure boredom—like anger, despair, shame—is to move toward it. To listen to it. To try to understand it.” There are moments when the repetitive tedious tasks of parenting are annoying, and moments of exhaustion when I just need a break, but I’m learning to find the loss of agency is also sometimes a freedom from having to think so much about how to maximise your time, and to go with the flow. I’ve been cooking throughout the holiday and one of the things I love about holiday cooking are the constraints. Without the full access to my store cupboard and all my tools, what can I do with what’s in front of me to make something delicious. In the same way the constraints of life as the parent of an infant bring their own rewards. Is it boring? So far, it’s not.
