Why write about parenthood?

Sometimes I sit down to write, and I can’t.

More often than not, the only topics that really move my heart (and fingers) to put something down on a digital page are, in some way, related to being a parent.

Parenting is the great leveler. Not everyone becomes one, but everyone who becomes one becomes the same thing.

I sit there, stuck, wondering if I really want to write about parenthood as much as I do. With a blank look on my face, my fingers resting on the thin black keys, the cursor blinking on the white page, my eyes search the sky as I investigate the corners in my brain trying to find anything I really care about.

Stuck, at a loss.

Slipping on Hot Wheels

So I ask myself, “Why wouldn’t I write about parenthood?” People who are single and dating write about finding love. People in war write about death. I’m a dad, so I write about slipping on Hot Wheels cars first thing in the morning, the pictures my kids draw, and how being the bad guy (because if you don’t teach your kids right, no one else will) really is the worst part of it all because I really just want to have a good time with my kids.

I saw a post from Barstool Sports the other day. It read: “Negotiation Masterclass: Hunter Renfrow Missed 10 Calls From The Panthers About Signing A Contract Because His Daughter Declined Them All To Watch 'Bluey' On His Phone.”

I don’t know who Hunter Renfrow is, and I don’t really care about professional football, but it was one of the most human and relatable things I had read that day. It doesn’t matter how much money you have or how famous you are, if you are a parent, you are a parent, and if you are a parent, you know what that means.

The great leveler

Parenting is the great leveler. Not everyone becomes one, but everyone who becomes one becomes the same thing. Sometimes, I see videos of kids in Japan or Africa, South America or some other far-flung place, and they are doing the same things my kids do. Sometimes, I see silly “parent humor” Instagram videos from these same places, and I get the jokes. I have no idea what they are saying, but I know what’s happening.

I once saw a video of a baby gorilla poking a big gorilla in the butt and running away whenever the big gorilla turned his head to see who was doing the poking. After the third poke, the big gorilla (who we are supposed to believe is the parent) chases after the little gorilla, disappearing off screen. Someone’s in trouble.

Ever since having kids, I’ve been trying to figure out what really changes in you. I don’t mean the surface level stuff like having another little person to care for or worry about. I don’t mean the obvious logistical stuff of transportation, either. I mean the deeper thing. The feeling inside that you didn’t feel before.

I’m not sure I really understand it and am not sure I can really put it all into words, either. The closest I’ve been able to come to describing it is when you are a parent, you become more of everything: more intense and harsher, yet also, weirdly, more emotional and softer. I think you just become more human, and the knowledge that this becoming more in every way is a universal experience is comforting in some sense.

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Photo by Taylor Kopel via Unsplash

On the same page

In our strange era, we have a tendency to see ourselves as something apart from the world. With so much criticism to level at the multitude of problems we see, we end up estranged from more and more of the basic human experience of life on earth in 2025. On a shrinking island floating off beyond the atmosphere and into space, we are alone with a critical stance directed toward everything and everyone else.

We are atomized by the format of the digital world, too. Weirdly connected in some new, shallow ways, but alone and isolated in other deeper ones. There’s no mass media anymore and no grand civilizational stories, either; no one’s on the same page. An empty world observed by lonely people with nothing in common other than the fact that they share nothing in common. That’s how the modern world can feel at the extreme.

But that universal experience of being a parent, that’s real, and it’s comforting, and it’s not going away. It’s not dependent on time or era. Sure, maybe parenting looked a little different in the year 392, but there were parents, and there were kids, and some things never change.

Not alone, not unique

The knowledge that you aren’t alone and that even people who you don’t like and will never like share that same thing; the realization that you even share this with your greatest enemies, and even though you never meet, there is some unspoken thing or secret you are both aware of: There is something strangely comforting about it.

I write about being a parent because that’s who I am right now. It’s what fills my days and what makes my worries. I like writing about it because I have a lot to say about it, even if I sometimes wonder if I should write about it as much as I do. But I think I also write about it, or enjoy writing about it, because of the universalism of it, the leveling, and the historically unremarkable yet totally transformational experience it (being a parent) is.

It's also humanizing knowing I’m not alone and not unique and that all parents and all kids are the same in some way — it’s always been this way and always will be. It’s playing a little part in a big story, the biggest one in the world: the story of life. I think I'll keep writing about being parent.