Here’s an attempt to explain how becoming a parent changes everything. I was on the mid-morning shift with my three-week old daughter, so around 6:00–9:00 AM — not to be confused with first morning (12:00–3:00), early morning (3:00–6:00), or late morning (9:00–12:00). After trying all of my best moves to get her to stop crying, she pooped her pants. Sorry, Shea, but that gave me hope.
I took her to the upstairs changing table (a pad on the desk) and got to work. Though I had grown wary of the sneaky mid-change pee, I was unprepared for my first projectile poop. Shea sent a glorious blast of green and yellow baby feces a couple of feet across the desk and into two cups of pens and pencils. Thereafter, she resumed screaming.
I changed her diaper and warmed up a bottle and wiped down the cups and cleaned the poop off each pen and pencil and then dried them by rolling them on a paper towel while Shea let me know via wailing that she wanted some milk au naturel.
To provide additional context, all of this was interrupting a self-initiated mental retreat. My intention that morning was to devise a short and powerful statement that explained the essence of my passion project, GoodMenders (rejected ideas included: not your typical men, on the mend, and good for you). As I vaulted between worlds of mindfulness and panic, determination and desperation, I realized that one realm was absent: anger.
Once it was all quiet on the baby front, the remarkableness of the moment struck me like the view from a mountaintop. Substitute nearly any other person for my daughter under the same circumstances, and I would have been positively irate. I laughed when she defecated on two cups full of pens and pencils. Everything does change when you become a parent, but only in the sense that you gain a new lens for experiencing the meaning of life:
I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth — that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. (Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning)
Not very poetically, I did stumble upon the words I was looking for during my mental retreat, albeit a touch later than I had projected. They were not my treasure. What I found in the tomb of flying feces was not success or happiness. My discovery was much more valuable.
When I stopped pursuing self-achievement, I achieved. When I chose fascination over frustration, I was captivated. And when my daughter pulled the same stunt at 11:00 that evening, this time downstairs and on the wall and the lamp and the end table, I was convinced.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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