So Far, So Good: 40 Dads Talk About Becoming Parents and How They Figured It Out
Sample Chapter
Introduction
When my wife told me she was pregnant in October 2021, I was, like many first-time expecting parents, a mix of terrified and excited. Mostly terrified, though. Like if my mix of terrified and excited was a mixed drink someone served you—say, a screwdriver, with the vodka representing “excited” and the orange juice representing “terrified”—you would probably take the first sip and ask the bartender, “Did you actually put any vodka in this?”
I had a million questions, only about 12 of which I was able to put into words, for example, “Do I know any babies?” and “Are you sure there’s no certification exam we need to pass before we do this?”
I was 42 years old, and I’d be 43 by the time the kid was born, and I still felt like I was barely able to take care of myself. I picked up some books about parenting, and found them to be informative and often thoughtful, but they didn’t quite put me at peace with the massive change that was about to plop into my lap. Everything I read seemed to be not quite what I needed. And I wasn’t sure what it was I did need.
So I started calling my friends who were dads. I needed to tell them our big news anyway, so I figured, why not ask them for some advice? Except I didn’t want to ask them outright, like “Hey Chris, we’re having a baby, can you give me some advice?” So I wrote up a list of 20 questions, mostly based on my own worries: Were you scared you were going to lose your identity, or free time? Did you always want kids? How did your relationship (or lack of a relationship) with your own father inform your approach to parenting? What’s something you would do differently? How many diapers did you change?
I texted or emailed friends with a vague request to interview them for “a project I’m working on,” and when we started our video call, I immediately told them why I was doing these interviews: We were going to have a baby.
From their responses to this news, I learned, like probably all expecting parents, that having a kid means you automatically become a member of a cult. These people, parents, will tell you how challenging, disgusting, and straight-up awful it can be, while simultaneously saying it’s the most wonderful/incredible experience you’ll have in your life, and they’re so happy for you. It is, in my experience, very similar to running ultramarathons, and talking to someone else who is also an ultrarunner: The two of you step off to the side of a party and regale each other with tales of blisters, chafing, nausea, gastrointestinal distress, sleep deprivation, hallucination, exhaustion, injuries, and other forms of discomfort you’ve experience while running 50 or 100 miles, all the while laughing and joking, not realizing someone nearby is catching bits of your conversation, making facial expressions of confusion and/or horror, and you suddenly remember that Oh yeah, that’s actually not normal behavior.
After being surprised at the beginning of our call with the news that I was going to join The Cult, these friends always agreed to talk about their experience. Everyone answered the questions in a different way. Sometimes they’d tell stories they’d obviously told dozens of times. Sometimes they’d sit with a question for a minute or two because it was the first time they’d ever thought about something. They laughed, and sometimes got choked up. All of them could tell me exactly how old their kids were, but almost no one could remember how old they were when their first kid was born. They talked about what was hard about being a parent, and they talked about the joy of it. They talked about mistakes they’d made, things they thought they’d done well, and ways their partner’s evolution into a parent surprised or amazed them.
After every single interview, I felt a slight sense of relief. These people I talked to would never call themselves “experts” at parenting, but all of them had expertise. Every single one of them was an imperfect human being, just like me, and they were getting through it, figuring it out as they went—so maybe I could too.
After a few interviews, I started to think that the things my friends were saying about becoming parents might be helpful to other people who, like me, were looking for some wisdom from regular dads. I think it helped me wrap my head around the idea of bringing a little human into the world, and I hope there’s something in these pages that can help you, too, whether you’re about to become a dad, or know someone who is about to become a dad—and who has no idea what they’re doing. Like me.
—
Chapter 1: Dan, Rhode Island
Dan, 41, Rhode Island, is co-owner and creative director of a video production company, and father of an eight-year-old, a six-year-old, a three-year-old, and a one-year-old. The kids’ mother is Dan’s wife, Kateri, a full-time mom.
I think my dad is the blueprint, 100 percent. I don’t know where to start exactly. Sense of humor, not taking things too seriously, always joking around, and always making a game of things, ridiculous nicknames, things like that. He did coach soccer even though he had no idea what soccer was. He just rolled with the punches. Definitely the blueprint. He was a self-employed carpenter, so I also saw a little bit of that entrepreneurial aspect—although he literally gave me zero business advice ever and never talked about what it meant to own a business.
I don’t know if that is a part of it, but I think I always admired that about him that he did run his own business and had that freedom to do what he wanted to do, and then be there for us when he needed to be there for us. I think he’s a big reason why I see owning a company means being able to control my schedule and being able to just—like yesterday, if it didn’t rain, I was going to break early to bring the kids skiing or whatever it was.
***
I came from a family of three and my wife came from a family of four, and we had great relationships with our siblings. I saw the joy in children after being one for a while. I wanted to relive that joy through a potential clone of myself or a clone of my wife. I had no timetable. I probably wouldn’t have had one yet if it didn’t—I wasn’t forcing the issue. We dated for 10 years, and her “ridiculous nickname” was ‘Big One’ from very early on in our relationship…so, I knew…but that shows my level of ability to commit to something. Ten years. I probably should have gotten married sooner. She was the one to say, “Hey, let’s get an apartment.” “Hey, let’s get a dog.” “Hey, let’s think about getting married.” “Hey, let’s get a house.” All that. Those big life monumental decisions were usually subliminally coaxed by my wife.
***
Did I have any fear that I was going to lose freedom, identity, free time? For sure. All of the above. Having kids at 33, I think had a pretty good buffer of freedom. I traveled the world via college, and then traveled the world after college with friends, and then traveled the world with my girlfriend who became my wife. Even when we got married, our honeymoon was South Africa and we did New Zealand and we did Thailand and Sri Lanka. We worked through a couple of passports in that decade in between college and deciding to finally make that leap. I think easily the kid could have come before we were ready to have the kid.
I think even when you say “ready to have kids,” I don’t think you’re ever ready for what happens. Maybe you’re deciding that it’s time to take the leap, but you’re certainly never going to be ready for what is about to come on the other side of that decision.
I think that that amount of time and that amount of traveling and that amount of life experience, even from a business perspective, our business was in a pretty good place by the time we were having kids and things like that. Financially, it was a good time and all that. I could see that if a kid snuck up on me six years prior, how it would maybe have felt a little more jarring as if things weren’t fully finished. That whole thing of a lot of travel left undone, but I think at that point, I was ready. There’s only so many times you can go out to the bar and sleep in your friend’s lawn or whatever.
***
I’m out mowing the lawn. Kate comes walking out to tell me, “Hey, we got to go to the hospital.”
My first thought was not to go get the bag and go get the things to go to the hospital. It was, “Let me take a picture of you. Let’s do a quick picture.” I figured, “Just in case we don’t do this again. Let me just make sure I have one decent picture of you.”
That’s when I took the picture—her official maternity portrait—which is ridiculous, and will never be shown to anyone. She’s literally having contractions.
And: I hadn’t eaten all day long and she hadn’t eaten all day long. I said, “Let’s stop at Taco Bell.” We went through the drive-thru. We showed up at the hospital and she was 9 or 10 centimeters dilated. It was literally ready to go.
She didn’t have a threshold of how much further it was going. She didn’t know the pain threshold of, “Is this the worst it’s going to get? Do I have four more hours of this?” We had the app that was supposed to help us with the timing, but we really didn’t do a great job of it.
That just became a running joke: “Okay, well maybe we should eat, be well-fed the day that we’re going to go to the hospital.” That sounds completely ridiculous but that was definitely something we did better for the subsequent children.
***
The biggest change in my life, first year of being a dad? I didn’t go out. Not a ton of social engagement. It was really just locking in to the experience, taking it all in, doing the best we could, and learning as much as we could. My wife is definitely the only reason why we can have four. You know what I mean? She is incredibly good at what she does. She is incredibly selfless.
I think you have to get over yourself pretty quickly. You can’t feel bitter that you’re missing a night out with your friends. You have to decide, “Let’s just lock in and just do this together,” because I think that otherwise, you are going to have some bitterness, and that bitterness is going to seep into the relationship, and you’re going to be less happy and things like that. Make sure you set those expectations with yourself. I think that was something in the first year that was a resetting of those expectations. We can make this difficult on ourselves and have that FOMO, or we can be present.
***
I definitely had to realign my business expectations and try to travel less. I just cleaned out the office recently and came upon this huge pile of bag tags. I had saved all these bag tags, the things that they stick on your luggage when you check a bag for a flight. It’s a realization that before we had kids, I was traveling a lot for work. I think there was a big reset of really making sure that we started to work towards being able to freelance or being able to hire full-time people that could help us work in remote locations and continue the vision of doing good work in cool places, but that I wouldn’t always have to be the one on the plane. That was one of my big shifts.
That was really hard because when you’re starting out a creative enterprise, you don’t think that you can translate that to somebody else. You don’t think that you can hire the person that can keep your vision alive, but that’s a naïve way to think about it. You’re definitely not the best—I’m not the best shooter or director or creative or whatever. Other people can do it just fine, and I can play my role here as best I can.
***
One thing a friend and I talked about recently was how we used to judge parents before we became parents. When our older siblings had kids and you’d go over their house, and they were making them peanut butter and jelly when they’re feeding everybody else whatever the whole group is eating. Then the kids are always like, “I only want peanut butter and jelly.” You’re telling yourself, “I’ll be able to make my kids eat whatever we’re eating.”
I would say that that judgment is ill-advised. Wait until the simple act of making a peanut butter jelly stops the madness. You’re going to pick the peanut butter and jelly route.
***
Madness and magic can happen from moment to moment. It can flip on a switch. One second you’re literally ready to drive into a tree and then the next second they say something incredibly cute and you’re like, “Man, this is the best.”
The breastfeeding thing seems so overwhelming. The thought that she just stopped breastfeeding. It was the end of an era, but she was pregnant or breastfeeding for nine years. That’s back-to-back-to-back-to-back. That is true commitment and just superhero level of selflessness. That is pretty incredible. I don’t know if that factors in. Breastfeeding is just the most miraculous built-in, skill/whatever that is, a superpower I guess. I know that some people don’t fall in that spectrum or whatever, but her ability to do that over nine years was truly impressive.
***
If I had a sign with my parenting motto on it, it would say, “Have fun. This won’t last forever,” because I think that’s really what it is. This is a limited-time offer and just make sure you try to have as much fun as possible. I think of the times where it’s all going haywire like on a weekend when I can’t help or when I come home, a lot of times, I just crank some David Bowie and it’s dance party time. You can’t be screaming and having a bad time when there’s fun dance music going down.
A lot of times on the weekend, I’ll just sense that it’s all going haywire and it’s, “Let’s go on a mission,” and I haven’t even really thought of what the mission is yet, but it’s just, “We’re going to figure this out as we go along.” I’ve come up with hacks along the way of gamifying hikes where there’s this species of gummy worm that lives in the forest and I’ll literally have a pack of gummy worms and I’ll just be plopping them along the way. Make up stories and make up reasons why we just don’t stay in the house and rot. It’s just, “Let’s get out and have some fun.”
***
I don’t want to be the person that’s doing the reprimanding. I don’t want to be the disciplinarian. When you try to be a disciplinarian sometimes, you don’t even believe it yourself. It’s that thought of, “Maybe I’m not that,” so you gotta come up with maybe some different approaches to command respect.
You gotta be clever with your methods. They really keep you on your toes, because sometimes when you’re going to try to teach a lesson, and you’re asking yourself, “Does that make sense? I don’t know if the words that came out of my mouth are even working right now, but I’m trying my best. We’ll workshop that one.”
That’s a good thing about four kids. I just tell myself, “Maybe I’ll get the next one. The next one will respect me.”
—
Thanks for reading this sample chapter of So Far, So Good: 40 Dads Talk About Becoming Parents and How They Figured It Out
To buy the book in hardcover or ebook editions, visit