On Parenthood: They Are Not Yours

Sat Aug 16 2025

The shock

One day they put a tiny, helpless human in your arms and walk away. No manual. In my case this happened twice in the space of two years. And the second time it wasn’t just one tiny little human, but two.

No prep course. Just fragments of advice from every direction, most of it contradictory, none of it useful when the baby actually starts screaming. You’re on your own.

It tests everything. Your patience, your resilience, your relationship. Suddenly you are responsible for keeping another human alive. Entirely dependent on you, that child doesn’t care if you’re tired, broke, confused, or falling apart. They need you anyway.

Something primal kicks in. The rational brain steps aside, and instinct takes the wheel. Overnight, your life reorganises around the baby. Attention, energy, sex, sleep, all of it gets rerouted. The old balance is gone, and it won’t come back for decades.

Parenthood is the longest, hardest project you’ll ever run. It drags you into parts of yourself you never knew existed and some you wish you’d never found.

But here’s the first hard truth: they are not you.

They are not even yours.

The base code

Every child comes wired with their own configuration. Some are restless, some calm. Some meet the world with curiosity, some with suspicion. That’s not your doing.

You can influence the environment, but you don’t author the core. They come with their own perception of life, their own leanings, their own way of processing the world.

As a parent you orbit that code, trying to support it, sometimes clashing with it. But you don’t write it.

At best, you are a witness.

The distortion

What you do write is the overlay. Your patterns, your fears, your lessons, your wounds, all of it seeps into them. You teach them how to see the world, but your version of reality is warped by your own past and experiences, by the overlays your own parents imposed on you.

That’s the trap: you can only hand them what you have, and it’s never neutral.

Sooner or later, they’ll strip it back. They’ll ask: who am I beneath my parents’ fingerprints? That peeling hurts. They may hate you for it. They may reject you. And they may even be right to. Chances are you did the same with your parents’ baggage.

That line from the Bible: “The sins of the fathers down to the seventh generation.” Not divine punishment, just observation. Cycles repeating until someone decides to break them.

The temptation

Most parents think the role comes with rights: to sculpt, to demand, to treat their children as extensions of themselves. I don’t buy it.

My kids aren’t bonsai trees for me to prune into shape. They’re not proof of my success or failures. They’re not even mine.

I’m not their author. I’m their custodian.

The paradox

It is not fucking easy.

You love them with a depth you didn’t know existed and at the same time, they frustrate you, repel you, even scare you. Some days you don’t like them. That’s real. They are mirrors of you, after all, and mirrors can be brutal.

The job isn’t to eliminate that paradox. It’s to live inside it without losing your mind and getting lost in your own forests of fear. To keep loving without trying to control, to guide them without colonising their minds, to protect them without suffocating them or robbing them of valuable experiences.

And that paradox doesn’t exist in isolation. Parenthood doesn’t just reshape how you love, it rewires every part of your life.

The economics of attention

Children don’t just take your time; they take your mind. Your hours fragment into shards of interruption. You stop thinking in long arcs and start living in 90-second bursts between cries, spills, and endless questions. Deep inner work dies, there simply isn’t capacity for it. You become reactive instead of proactive, surviving instead of creating. Operating out of stimulus-response instead of intention and design.

It’s not just sleep deprivation, it’s total cognitive restructuring. And it lasts decades.

The marriage casualty

The baby bulldozes your relationship. The person you once loved as a partner becomes a co-manager of chaos. Nights once spent touching and connecting are now spent negotiating logistics at 2am. Sex fades, intimacy withers. An entire part of your relationship gets shoved into the shadows, waiting for ‘later’, ‘later when there’s time and we can breathe’. Most of the time ‘later’ never comes.

Some couples claw their way back. But many don’t.

Parenthood is a stress test, and most marriages break under it. Most people don’t fully recover from it.

Identity erasure

The person you were before kids doesn’t just change, they vanish. Your interests, your friendships, your ambitions may all be consumed. You become a function rather than a person: feeder, cleaner, scheduler, fixer, breadwinner, carer.

Some parents eventually reclaim who they were. But most never do.

The comparative trap

Everywhere you look, someone’s measuring your worth through your children. Social media, school gates, family members, other parents. Your kid’s development becomes a public scoreboard: milestones, grades, sports, achievements, behaviour, etc.

You end up performing parenthood instead of living it. In most cases it is perfectly natural to end up resenting the process, or even your own kids. This is indicative of a broken system, one designed to foster compliance and ‘fitting in’, one that lays the expectation on you as parent to foster ‘normalcy’ into a unique individual.

From the day they are born the edges are shaved off. Smoothed down. Rounded nicely. Until what remains is the picture life expects of them. And you, as the parent, unknowingly helped facilitate it.

The mortality mirror

Watching your kids grow means watching yourself, in a way, diminish. Each birthday is a reminder that they are replacing you, which is the point, but also the terror. You see your face in theirs, your habits in their movements, your past in their present.

Parenthood is also a countdown clock.

The money reality

Children are expensive in ways you can’t calculate upfront. It’s not just food, clothes, and school fees, it’s opportunity cost. Careers that stall, moves you can’t make, risks you can’t take. Every decision filters through what it means for the kids. They become the first consideration in your mind, for anything you want to do, explore, experience.

You trade financial freedom for a different kind of debt: the weight of responsibility.

The friendship graveyard

Childless friends drift. They stop inviting you out because you’re never free. Parent friends appear, but the bond is often circumstantial, forged at playgrounds and birthday parties, not by choice. Your social life shrinks, replaced by school gates and WhatsApp groups and sports events and talent shows.

Loneliness dressed in community clothing.

The privilege

At the end of the day, my work is simple. I was given three children. My role is to keep them safe, respect them as human beings, and witness their becoming.

I don’t get to choose their direction. I don’t get to rewrite their code. I don’t get to claim them as mine. What I do get to do is remove the thorns from their bare feet when they ran outside and got stuck. I get to put plasters on their wounds when they fell off their bikes. I get to pull their loose teeth. I get to kiss their tears when life becomes too much for them. I get the opportunity to learn to be tender, loving, careful, guiding, observant and I get to be amazed at who they become every single day.

The privilege is in watching three unique lives unfold in front of me, not in bending them to match my own design or desires. That’s enough.

In fact, there’s nothing as rewarding as that.