#229: Living to please your future self

I recently came across a screenshot in my phone of a social post with over 10,000 likes. It reads, “Last night, my daughter asked if we could pause bedtime ‘just to sit.’ No book, no show, no distraction. Just her little head on my shoulder and her tiny hand holding mine. Someday, she won't ask to sit. So I sat. And I didn't move.” The anecdote is sweet (no offense to the dad who posted it), but that’s not why I saved it. I saved it for the fourth sentence: Someday, she won’t ask to sit. This is the load-bearing detail, the one I suspect made it go viral, and it has less to do with sentimentality than parental paranoia. The subtext of this post is not that parenthood is beautiful but that you will one day regret every moment you didn’t appreciate with your child. The crowd goes wild for that kind of anxiety fodder.

A few months ago, I propped my phone on a pile of laundry and recorded a video to my future self. “I’m recording this for my future self who misses early parenthood and thinks that I didn’t appreciate it enough,” I declared, clutching a folded towel and sounding a little self-righteous. “And I just want to say to you, I do appreciate it. I appreciate it every day!” The video is of course absurd: I’m arguing with a version of myself that doesn’t yet exist, accusing her of misunderstanding me, and then defending myself against myself. There’s a certain logic to it though (if you’ve lost your mind). Like the dad who shot his consciousness into the future in order to pressure himself to sit quietly with his daughter (I bet he would have done it anyway), our perception of time casts our continuing selves into different roles. There’s the ignorant younger self, lacking the rich perspective of the present self, and the spectre of the all-knowing future self, who will surely look down on our present choices. It’s a linear view and it makes technical sense, but I’m not sure it always serves us.

What if we know less about our own pasts than we think? What if we compulsively forget the details, the stakes, the challenges, the drudgery, the feelings that inspired us to act how we once did? What if, in this way, our reflections on our pasts can be woefully elementary? There’s no better evidence that we misremember our pasts than the older people who come up to me on sidewalks or in grocery stores or at parks and insist that if I so much as blink my eyes, I will miss my daughter’s childhood. Their intentions are pure, and I think they believe what they’re saying, but I can say with the confidence of someone presently living through the early child-rearing years that they’re wrong. And one day, when I eventually agree with them, I’ll be wrong, too.

I blink all the time, and I’m still here: preparing food and cleaning, wiping, scrubbing it up no fewer than five times a day; singing no fewer than 15 songs; reciting no fewer than 30 catchphrases; depositing no fewer than 50 kisses on Sunny’s plump cheeks between every sunrise and sunset. Avi and I track her personality like scientists, discussing the developments every night in bed: the new way she pronounces popsicle (“possible”); the specific way she raises her eyebrows when she hears a siren; the tone with which she identifies colors (different than last week). We know the 14 steps of her bedtime routine like our own names and have memorized the way the sky looks outside our living room window at 3am (lighter than you’d think). We are in heaven and in hell, always at the end of our resources, then finding more. The days are long and difficult and full of laughter and surprises. If one day I think it all happened in an instant, that will be my memory’s fault, not mine.

One way to think of regret is a lack of trust in our former selves. When we regret something, we believe that our former selves ought to have made a different decision, but how much do we really know of our former selves? And in what ways do we underestimate them? When older parents tell me “the years go by so fast” with a pained slant in their eyebrows, maybe they’re the ones who need reassuring: It’s okay, I might tell them. I’m sure you enjoyed it! I’m sure it felt long and arduous when you were in it. I’m sure you were tired and joyful beyond measure. There’s nothing to regret, there’s nothing else you could have done. There are probably some parents who truly took their children for granted, but I doubt they’re the ones fretting over it years later. Regardless, it’s projection.

I want to clarify that I’m not arguing over whether the early years of parenthood feel like they went fast upon reflection, I’m arguing that this is purely a function of hindsight and not an actual experience in the present. This is an important distinction, because it means the observation is functionally irrelevant; inoperable. There are moments when I think Sunny’s first year went by fast, then I stumble across an old photo or text and my perception of those early months unfolds like an accordion and I’m stunned to recall the depth and variety of experiences I underwent, the majority of which have now been lost to me, and which may be recalled only in bits and pieces over the rest of my life. The loss of the fullness of these experiences is okay, because I lived them already, was indelibly shaped by them, and that was the point.

Another clarification: I didn’t really record that video for my future self. I recorded it for my present self, who’s managed to absorb every older parent’s nostalgia and feels perpetually afraid that I’m doing something wrong—somehow failing to slow time down to the appropriate speed or document every moment to prevent its devastating loss. I’m not actually annoyed at those wistful parents (I find them sweet); I’m annoyed at myself for allowing them to make me paranoid. This pathology is uniquely suited to early parenthood, which introduces a rapidly changing being whom you love more than life itself alongside an unrelenting amount of work you can’t help but wish away. These must be the perfect conditions for fearful paralysis: fear of change, fear of no change. The paranoia might occasionally encourage me to pause and appreciate what I have, but at what cost? I’d be pausing anyway, and do all the time.

I’ve written about this in relation to parenthood before, and the conclusion I came to then—that the time warp of the experience, however painful, is in orbit with its divine appeal—still feels right. In response to this idea, I’ve been trying to trust the spongey structure of my mind: what it absorbs, what it doesn’t, what it can support, what it can’t. This feels much better than assuming I’m meant to interrupt the process with enforced gratitude or note-taking or other tips and tricks for optimizing parenthood. “Optimizing parenthood”—it’s good to sit with that phrase when I feel particularly sick of my own neuroses. I still take photos, jot down little things when I have it in me. But I try to make it fun and let it go when it’s not.

I’ve been this way since long before Sunny. I have a well-documented record-keeping compulsion and an inherited belief that in order to truly thrive I have to reject what comes naturally. I still operate like that decently often—sublimating what feels right and seamless for the sake of serving some higher goal. I’m thinking of silly examples, like forcing myself to clean when I’m not in the mood, rather than trusting the mood will come soon enough, saving me from an unnecessary slog. Effective as this style of discipline may be at times, it’s also a fearful way to operate; fear of future regret, fear of judgement. What would it feel like to resist it? To live instead according to the intelligence of our moods, our memories, our natural abilities and proclivities? If it’s true that our future selves are liable to be misguided in their views of what we ought to have done and when, maybe it’s not worth trying so hard to please them. Plus, we’re only ever guessing anyway.

A funny TikTok I once saw: A woman is struggling to get her kids into their carseats while they were throwing simultaneous tantrums and she is furiously blinking her eyes, trying to miss it.

The last time my mom came to visit, she told me tenderly that I was in a hard season of life, despite all the magic and fun. It was a relief to hear, not because I think she knows my life better than I do, but because it felt true. As much as my mom adores little kids, the hardship of early motherhood is seared into her bones, unusually resistant to romanticization. I was grateful for the resonance of her words, which had the funny effect of making me feel far lighter than someone insisting I was at a high point. It’s true what I said in the video—that I revel in motherhood every day, that I’m soaking it in. It just so happens that this sometimes feels like drowning. People mean well when they tell young parents or young anyone to seize the day, but seizing is just living, with all its requisite complications.

My favorite article I read last week was “I Deleted My Second Brain,” by Joan Westenberg, on deleting her massive archive of notes and ideas (a.k.a. her second brain) in a bid to commit to the present. Last Friday’s 15 things also included my favorite Wikipedia page, a genius expression I recently learned (from the comments of last week’s podcast), the perfect Subway Take, and more. The rec of the week was tips for beginner campers.

I hope you have a nice Sunday!
Haley