“Trying to talk myself out of wanting kids. My husband keeps pushing back our baby timeline because of stress and instability at his workplace. My mom’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and I’m finishing up a full-time professional degree. The end of all my free time is approaching like a freight train -- within 9 months I’ll be job-hunting, job-doing, and caregiving -- so why would the *absence* of screaming babies distress me?”
-Rita
I first see the house on my second time circling the mountain.
Or, part of the house.
It’s a gabled peak of corrugated steel jutting out of sub-tropical rainforest like a little, upturned tin boat. I’ve been driving for over an hour, along winding bosky roads with very little to see of anyone else except the occasional passing car. Just me and the baby asleep in the back.
The mountain feels, somehow, lonesome. It’s nice, in that it’s quiet, and I’ve finally gotten the baby to sleep. But I can’t help but feel a kind of emptiness all around us. As if the whole world had ended and its just us left forever driving around a lonesome mountain.
And then, the road pours out onto a curve that becomes a cliff-side and suddenly there’s a valley below.
Or, the shape of a valley, anyway. It’s so packed to the brim with forest that it’s hard to make out anything except one singular plane of undulating, interweaving green beneath the sky. All but for the roof of the house that’s poking out of the trees. It’s almost hiding, but I have just enough time to spot before the road swoops away, leaving me to wonder:
Why on earth would anyone build a house out here?
Parenthood is a kind of personal apocalypse.
In the years leading up to becoming a parent I was told - by family and friends who had already sailed away into the far off lands of parenthood - that having children completely changes your life. I’d seen siblings and their partners turn grey overnight, I’d heard the stories of sleepless nights, exhaustion, and stomach bugs. I’d heard the venting frustration and I’d listened to the guilty flickers of regret buried under a thousand arguments that it’s worth it.
But, I still didn’t quite understand it.
Then we had a kid. And, lo, as foretold, everything prophesied came to pass. Your life ends, all the things you took for granted, like sleep, are suddenly vanished.
You die a little.
This sounds dramatic because it is. You walk into hospital one day and walk out again with every single thing in your life forever altered. Because it must. And you try to bargain with it, make plans to escape the fate of every other parental ragnarok, but inevitably, you too, will perish.
You’ll give up trying to get full nights of sleep or to keep your bed to just yourselves. You’ll put on the TV when you promised no screens till they turned three. You’ll give them ice cream and buy them babychinos and have a dwindling list of non-negotiable parental red lines to not cross.
This makes perfect sense when you think about it because the person who made those plans and that list is gone. They sank in the flood waters when they broke on the hospital floor, and now you’re someone new.
In the years leading up to becoming a parent, I lost a lot of people.
Between 2018 and 2024 I lost everyone from my professional mentor to my grandfather. A Bumble date turned close friend. The man who raised my wife. My mother. For a while, I would flinch whenever someone would call out of the blue.
After my dad developed a tendency to leave vague, somewhat sad sounding voicemails, I had to give strict coaching instructions on tone.
A bit more pizzazz, please, dad.
I once asked him, many decades my senior, when life would get easier. When loss would start to feel less like something hiding, in waiting, around the bend.
‘It doesn’t.’ He told me, ‘And it won’t.’
My dad trends towards this kind of doldrumish life advice. One of his favourite and most quoted pieces of wisdom is the reassuring affirmation that ‘There is never a good time for anything.’
This sounds on the surface to be a pretty depressing take on everything that life has to offer. But he always says it with a smirk and a twinkle in his eye and then goes on to add, ‘So you might as well do it now.’
I can see why he thinks this way.
By the time I rolled around into his life he was already four kids deep into parenthood. His business in computer software was struggling in the economic crisis of the eighties and staring down the barrel of bankruptcy. He even applied to the government small business stimulus program at the time, only to receive a letter in reply that read something along the lines of: ‘We see no viable future in the business of computing.’
That letter would be framed in his office.
It’s unfair to be so hard on whoever rejected his application - foretelling the future has always been a foolish game. They couldn’t know how tech would dominate the world’s economy in a short few decades. Or that my dads company would pull through, that he would make a go of things despite how hard it might seem, and thrive. Nor could he have known that my younger sister would join us little more than a year later.
I wonder now how much the idea of my sister, my siblings, and I helped sustain him through those times. It can’t have been easy, but when times are tough - it’s nice to have something to look forward to even if that thing is a world ending child.
In the months after becoming a parent, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be one.
It’s a discombobulating thing to have a child that you know, on a biological level, you love - but on a much more real, emotional level, you resent. And then you resent yourself for the resentment. Such is the life of a parent whose child has colic, and screams like a ghoul every evening for hours upon inconsolable hours.
We tried everything.
Swaddling, tonics, a fancy automated and Wi-Fi enabled bassinet. Rice formula. Four visits to nurses and lactation consultants, two GP visits, and calls to a support hotline. For months on end we slept in blocks that averaged less than forty minutes at a time. My wife and I would, in turns, become our own ghoulish, spaced out zombies for days at a time while the other parent picked up the slack. Until, it was their turn to temporarily fall to pieces.
And then, gradually, things got a little easier. And a little better. And he began to smile, and grasp for us with little chubby fingers. He learnt to sit and crawl and giggle. Glimmers of ‘Oh this is what its supposed to be like.’ and ‘Maybe we can actually do this, after all.’
‘Maybe this is good.’
At the time, we were living in a narrow three level townhouse.
Its a lot of stairs, as the midwife in the hospital pointed out to us. Deathtraps with right angles, those. So we set up babygates around the home and told him off whenever he would crawl over and shake them in their brackets.
Until, one day, when he was about ten months old. I had just gotten home, and was complaining about something at work that had been stressing me out for weeks. The gate began to shake. We called him to come back, to get away from that. But he didn’t. And the gate didn’t hold.
I have had a knife brandished at on me on the street and I’ve been chased by a bullshark in a midnight river. Nothing in my life was as terrifying as watching my baby son fall down ten individual steps.
In seconds we had rushed over, picked him up, and cradled him as he screamed in our arms. We checked him out from top to toe and found nothing except a bruise and a chip on one of his front teeth. My wife grabbed a frozen strawberry from the freezer and within a minute the little guy was happily chewing away as if nothing had ever happened.
But then I was crying. Something was swimming up out of my stomach and chest until all I could do was sob. I had no idea what was happening - except that I felt such a strange mixture of relief, and grief, and suffocating stress and it was all coming out at once.
Up until that point my son had never hugged me or said more than ‘mama’ and ‘more’ and maybe ‘bye-bye’. But right then he stopped gnawing on his frozen strawberry, looked at me puzzled, and mumbled,
‘Dada.’
And climbed into my lap to hug me.
This only made me sob more.
So he hugged me again until I hugged him back and everything seemed okay again and hey, we can all go back to eating our strawberries, right?
I lose sight of the house in a moment or two, and then we drive on back into the shaded side of the mountain.
This second time around, the sleep is a little better, but not much.
Our second son arrived sooner than we planned, and we’re back into the thick of juggling our lives like hot plates. He likes the car though. More than a handful of very early mornings or late afternoons I find myself driving around like this, until he’s had enough sleep and I can turn back home.
It’s been long enough, I figure, that by the time I get home now he should have had a full nap’s worth of sleep. So I take the next turn to descend the mountain from a route I’ve not yet taken and after one sharp curl, I’m surprised to find I’ve arrived at a school.
Of all the things to find on this empty mountain, I didn’t think to find a school. Or enough people to fill one. And yet, it’s a school. It’s mostly hidden behind a row of trees, but you can just glimpse a few classrooms and the front office.
There’s a pedestrian crossing that, on first glance, seems kind of preposterous for the lack of traffic. But then I imagine a local - probably an elder retireein a high-vis vest - running that little strip of road each morning and afternoon. An usher for dozens of little world ending cataclysms of good news, chipped teeth, tears, cancelled plans, and sleepless nights.
Along the school fence, beside the crossing, there is a great big, green, cheery banner that reads:
‘Friday Night! Community BBQ! Everyone Welcome!’
Problems is an essay-in-reply series about the things that keep us up at night. Readers send in their late night rumination, and I write something in reply - often the long way around. You can send something in via this form:
New Problems essays arrive every month, alongside my other work. Subscribe to get them in your inbox.