“Are you ready?” With only about a month left before the due date for our second kid, it’s a question I’m being asked constantly. (Way more often than ‘what’s up?’)
It makes sense, it’s an easy open ended question…but like, honestly…
Does anyone really know how to : ‘be prepared for a kid?’…I know I didn’t.
For a long time, my idea of ‘being ready’ was purely physical – it just meant that we’d bought all the ‘baby stuff’. Oh, that and also that the carseat had been professionally installed. But, even at that level of baby-prep, I didn’t really think too much about it because all that could be solved at Target. I fully believed that I could go from Dude-About-Town to Best-Dad-Ever, in about 15 mins and for about $400 (minus 5% with my RedCard Savings).
Then we had Augustine & I was wrong…ish
Granted, I installed the carseat in the hospital parking lot the morning we were going home and we had to stop at Walgreens for diapers on the way to the house, but still…we had pretty much all the stuff, so I assumed I was prepared. A few days home with Augustine (really maybe even that first night), I realized that there was actually no possible way to ‘be prepared’ for Dad Life.
What I learned at light-speed was : Raising a kid, especially a baby, isn’t one thing. it’s all sorts of things all the time. Like walking into an Elon Musk boardroom, anything could happen…let’s try flame throwers.
I don’t remember being completely overwhelmed at any time during those first few months as a Dad, but I vividly recall getting into a bunch of weird situations that felt like uncharted territory for mankind. Augustine would act some new way or try some new thing (like not eating), and Jade and I – we’d kinda panic about what it all meant, how the new pieces fit together and how we were supposed to respond to any of this.
That’s when Jade discovered The Atwater Mom’s Group.
Maybe you’ve heard of it. It was a local Facebook parent support group that offered crowdsourced answers to all the weird life situation that we thought only we were going through. For us, it was the encyclopedia and bible combined. I mean, literally, we went to the Atwater Mom’s Group for everything, even though we had a doctor on call 24/7.
Still, it was a Mom’s group…So naturally I started looking for the Dad Equivalent.
Joining Facebook Dad Groups.
Since Jade had more or less just stumbled onto the Atwater Mom’s group, I figured I’d have an easy time finding the same sort of supportive group for dads, and I was wrong.
At first I cherry picked the groups, joining only the one or two that seemed like the perfect fit for me. But, after the complete collapse of the first group from into Stand-Up Comedy Promotion Group and the conversion of the second group into a sort of private-trainer-hunting-ground, I took on a scatter shot approach, joining one, then another, then all of them. I became a member of every Dad Group I could find – hoping the right answer was somewhere in the weeds.
By now, I’ve easily joined over 17 ‘Dad’s Facebook Groups’ trying to find my tribe. And, I’m still searching…because I haven’t found a single Dad Group that I feel reflects my experience as a Dad or fits in with the type of values that I have as a person and/or a parent.
To put it another way, I didn’t like what anyone else wanted to talk about or share.
My Facebook feed became 50% Dad Stuff, and to be sorta blunt, all the posts read like middle aged thirst traps. Guys complaining or whining about the same things over and over. Husbands asking for help but not wanting to take advice. Confession after confession just for some sort of crowdsourced easy absolution. And like, photos of their kids a ‘life milestones’ – which just seemed like unwanted non-holiday, holiday card. I hated it, but I didn’t unfollow all groups, so the hits kept coming.
As weeks passed with new Dads posting similar problems again and again, the experiences that these people were going through got a lot less bizarre to me. The reoccurring themes solidified into sketch of what I think might actually be the average way most guys struggle with becoming a Dad – the modern pitfalls and obstacles of parenthood.
Side Note : I’m a firm believer that if the majority of people react a certain way, then on some level, I’m going to behave that same way. So, while the specifics were somewhat different between the Facebook posts, the general issues seemed to revolve around the same few things. And, while I might not identify with the extremes that I was reading, I had to belive that I connected in some way to these issues and these responses.
So, now, as I prepare to jump into the 2-Kid-Household lifestyle, I’ve gone back to this composite sketch of the-Modern-Dad-and-His-Problems, and looked into ways I can prepare myself for our next kid by preemptively addressing the most prevalent issues shared by the other Dads.
Really, preparing to be a Dad
Looking at the big picture, the hundreds of ‘help’ posts can be boiled down to a few key subjects:
- Anger
- Self-Confidence (in appearance & financially)
- Marriage
- Loneliness (or the feeling of being alone)
So, I took these themes and compared them to the specific posts – sorta like looking at the symptoms and the root causes at the same time. Based on what I was seeing in each case (and plugging in my on 6 years of experience as a Dad), I put together a list of actual ways to get ready to be a dad or ready for “Dad 2 : Daddit Again” or even “Dad 3 : Back in the Crib”.
I was trying to identify things that might make me more prepared beyond just checking off the shopping list and snapping in carseats, and I found a few that I hadn’t really thought of before. So here is my list of ways to actually ‘get ready’ to be a parent.
The Silver Bullet
If you want just one thing, one ‘preparation technique’ to put above everything else. My go to, solid gold advice is : Start a Yoga Routine
…specifically Yoga. Not just generally ‘working out’ or diving head first into an extreme pilates regiment. Just something basic, YMCA yoga is great. Committing to a few classes a week is a quick way to at least start addressing a lot of the problems guys seems to have when becoming Dads.
- It gives you, scheduled “you” time. And, ‘you time’ is super important. You have to have down time for yourself, and this helps turn that time into a chance to recharge. Also, if you start it in advance of having kids, your yoga class can become a routine that you organically shape your day/week around.
- It give you additional tools to breath, center and calm yourself, which is great. Even if you don’t get that great at breathing deep and chilling-out on your own at home, the time you set aside and separate out from your other life commitments to take the class can act as a reset button.
- It’s partly strength training – an apparent huge subculture of modern Dadlife is heavy fitness. Many of the online groups push becoming a ‘Man’ by which they mean, ‘Getting Jacked’. As if the only really good dad in the world is Vin Diesel. Having your own workout routine might help you avoid falling into that Dad-Bod body-image-trap.
Preparing Everything & Everything Else
Taking up Yoga is a really good catch-all, but if you want to get into the nitty-gritty, there’s more you can do to prepare….and I want to make sure I address the more granular stuff because…well…I found the transition from ‘guy’ to ‘father’ to be rough…
Quick Glimpse of my Dad Transformation
In my experience, becoming a parent was a change to who I was. The transition to ‘Dad’, alters the way you function and, maybe you feel it all at once, but most often – or at least in my case – it’s a slow period of change over the first two years as pieces of your old life are silently replaced by your new life.
As someone who fought it for a long time and lost, this transition can feel more like loss than rebirth.
Speaking personally, the ways I made it through the world before (relationships, openness, weekends, activities, etc.) weren’t the best ways for my world to operate when I became a dad – and many of the things that I had done before just weren’t even possible anymore.
I didn’t want to believe this, and for the first two years of being a Dad I fought it, but I think that if I had embraced this idea of change prior to becoming a Dad, I might have been able to better balance the before and after life, and I know I would have be able to better prepare for handling the issues that popped up once I was a Dad.
So if Yoga is the cleaver of preparation, here are the scalpel techniques that I think help preemptively address a lot of the problems I’ve run into and are echoed in Dad Post after Dad Post in all the ‘Be a Better Dad’ groups.
Let’s Start with The Individual : Me (I’m like You)
Let’s talk about anger because it’s the biggest, baddest obstacle to parenting and it never really goes away.
First off, everyone gets too angry. Sure, there are a hundred posts in Dad Groups asking for ways to walk back an explosion, but (at least to me) they’re hard to read (not like ‘emotionally’ hard to read, more like ‘boring’), and this let me detach myself from seeing my similarities.
Maybe I’m callous, but I tend to get a few lines into a ‘I got too angry’ post and suddenly my mind shuts off and just broadly labels the person who posted it as a stereotypical angry-dad, which makes it easy to distances that person and their actions from myself. In short, I minimize the poster by jumping to conclusions that the author is most likely someone who give orders, spanks, and says ‘because I said so’ on loop. (Someone who is ‘not me’.)
Most often, that’s let me think of myself as a better emotionally-balanced parent, but…if I’m being honest, I blow up. Every Dad alive has blown-up. We just don’t all do it in the stereotypical ‘bad-dad’ way.
I don’t cuss or hit or really even yell. When I show my anger, it’s usually with curt and dismissive statements that are aimed at cutting off Augustine’s answers. It might not seem like much compared to…like…‘Mommy Dearest’ but each one of us sets up our own family’s standards and practices and so our joy/anger/sadness are all expressed in completely unique ways…and that can make it hard to talk about.
It’s not easy to sit over a beer and complain to a fellow Dad that I ‘was curt to my daughter’.
Trust me, whatever you establish as your anger thresh-hold in your home, you’re gonna race right across it at some point as a parent. You are. Even with all the tools in the world, you’re gonna get irate in front of/and at your kid(s). Relax, everyone does it.
There’s nothing that’s going to totally prevent that, but having a few tools in your toolbox can make sure it happens less by helping you identify when it will happen and prepare you with ways to de-escalate yourself:
- Take Time to Identify What Sets You Off – I mean, this list will change as you raise your kid. (If I sat down and made a list before becoming a parent, being slapped on the the back of the knee never would have crossed my mind.) So make a list and keep it updated. When a trigger thrown at you, having that list will help you identify your feelings faster…and it will help you know that it’s time to make sure you check your emotions and take steps to calm yourself down.
- Figure Out Ways to Calm Yourself Down – After 6 years, I’ve come to the understanding that I can’t control how Augustine responds or acts in the moment. (Saying ‘calm down’ actually does nothing…it’s just air I breath out as I try and think of something else.) I can control myself though…not every time, but many times. I can calm down internally by identifying the situation as a trigger and telling my body to chill. I can walk away and say I need a minute. I can just breath and take a second to respond (the problem will still be there, waiting, even if I let myself gather my thoughts). Or, (although this can sometimes be a godsend and sometimes be yet another trigger) Jade can step in and let me leave the situation.
Some of this is stuff you can think about on your own, but that’s honestly just more work. Instead, let others help you figure all this out (and maybe surprise you with new answers you never though of). There are a few ways to do these things as you prepare to become a parent:
- You can can take a parenting class
- You can see a therapist
- Preemptively join a parent support class
- You can do Yoga
*Quick Side Note :: While we’re talking about emotions – we need to normalize crying. I’m not saying, let’s all cry and cry regularly. What I mean is, we need to get over the belief that crying is a personal milestone or some significant life event we’ll each remember for years.
Many guys in the Dad Groups focus on the fact that they cried about something and let that become a defining characteristic of the experience. But, crying is just crying – that’s all. Everyone has cried and we’ll all cry again – it’s not a life changing ordeal and we have to stop letting it overshadow the thing or experience that made us cry.
Let’s Talk About The Family : Your Spouse
Being a parent, you see your partner at their best and worst…
…that’s an oversimplification – what I mean is, you get to see the person you love – laugh like crazy and light up inside with pride, and you also see how they react when they get pooped on while wearing rental clothing or slapped in the face while trying to spoon feed macaroni or just massively embarrassed by bad table manners at a restaurant. That’s just some of what you’ll see…there’s a ton more. You watch your spouse deal with the most extreme moments of their life, and they see you do the same thing.
It’s hard on both parents at the same time, it’s a lot to take in and a lot to go through.
The kicker though is that since these situations are extreme and unexpected, they’re also stressful in all these weird and unique ways. They put pressure on a bunch of different aspects of a person and a relationship. Trust me, at some point, each of the imperfect bits of your relationship will the one place where all the stress is added.
Like anger, everyone has pain points in their relationship. Those need to be addressed prior to the birth of your kid. Parents and Soon-to-be-parents, need to figure out solutions to these while they are able to be addressed on a one-on-one basis and before they become complicated by brining in a new family member.
Like the personal issues, there are a few ways to try and preemptively address these problems:
- See a Marriage Counselor/Priest – This is *basic*, I know. But it might help, even if you don’t have any front-of-mind issues, it can help identify possible future problems and give you tools to address them. (Most of the Dad Groups have a big problem with their counseling. Which I think speaks more to ‘too little too late’ rather than ‘all counselors are morons’.) Personally, we haven’t taken couples counseling, and that doesn’t mean it’s not right for other people.
- Talk and Make Sure You Have Ways to Communicate – This is more that just ‘how was your day’, you need to have ways to communicate personal and/or work problems. With all the new solutions you’re going to get to find, you need a way of sharing this info – both the successes and the failures. This is big for me and Jade, we don’t talk about everything, but we can talk about anything we need to. Between us, there isn’t any fear, so we can talk about stuff together, which is really helpful.
- Stress Out – One of the best ways that Jade and I have figured out to get through things is to do hard things together, over and over. A lot of times it was with travel, many times it was with projects, and the worst times were trying to get the boat on-and-off the trailer. These were externally stressful situations that let us work through our anger and frustration and ultimately figure a way to survive, get home, and get the boat on the bunks. In the end, we had to figure out how to communicate through it and you better believe we each knew what worked and didn’t work the next time we wanted to put the boat in the water.
Your Community
Of all the things that changed when I became a Dad, I fought this change, the way friends and acquaintance wanted/need to shift in and our of my life, the hardest. By the time I gave up, everyone was already gone.
Like I mentioned before, becoming a parent changes who you are and how you behave. I think we could all guess that would happen on a personal level, but the collateral impact of this is that is changes your friend group.
For the first two years of being a Dad, I really held onto to the people I’d surrounded myself with up to that point – almost like putting them in a time capsule. it was hard, and never really felt right – like those shoes that just always remind you that you’re wearing shoes for some reason.
I was holding myself back from the natural direction my mind and body wanted to go while I was twisting these relationships to fit into spaces they weren’t meant to fill. That’s not to say that I had bad friends, I had and have amazing friends, but I was partitioning my life to be able to talk and act like two different people.
This worked until just about the time Augustine started walking around and actively engaging with the world…I think it was around 2. At that point, the momentum of my life that was heading towards a more consistently active role as a dad ate up the other parts that had been sealed off. Somewhat rapidly, my schedule and my hang-outs changed, and several people disappeared…I’d tried to hold onto them by keeping them away from something and when that thing became everything, they didn’t have a way in.
I’m not some evil, 2-faced person. I just though that a single dude that is 100% focused on their career wouldn’t really want to hear about diapers, bottles and the funny face Augustine made that day. Or just wouldn’t relate to it.
Based on the Facebook Groups, I think this happens to most adults who shift into family mode while their friends don’t. This can feel lonely. To be honest, I still haven’t fully recovered – and it’s been 6 years.
What saved me was that I embraced the parents of Augustine’s friends. Even when she was too small to really have friends, Jade and I reached out to the parents of the kids that she slept beside at daycare. I highly recommend being the outgoing one, the one who reaches out to the families that come into your orbit. These families won’t always work out, but some of them will.
Just a Heads Up, at least for me, a lot of the family-friends, they’re different than the friends we had before. I would say that without a doubt our palate of friends is more varied than ever, which is good and bad…depending on the day. But above all, the friends we’ve made this way have been sharing our same issues and so were helpful in ways we didn’t know we needed.
Finale
Going back through this list, it’s a lot of communication. Yoga is great for so many reasons, but obviously a bunch of getting ready to be a parent is making sure you have people to talk with stuff about and that you are able and ready to talk about it.
I think that’s why I hate the general barrage of ‘are you ready?’ questions that are being thrown at me all the time – they’re not really about talking. I don’t really know what they’re about, but I’m 100% sure that no one asking expects the person to scream “no man, I’m freaking the F**K OUT! You got some clues?!?!”
Thinking back through both our pregnancies, I didn’t have any real down-and-dirty discussions about the actual logistics of being a Dad. I had a ton of these surface level convos, which meant that my idea of ‘being prepared’ focused totally the external things I could talk about…getting the right stroller, plugging up the electric sockets, are Dr. Brown bottles actually worth it.
But, all of that, doesn’t really matter. If the baby doesn’t like the bottle – you can buy another one. It’s the hard to talk about stuff, the internal stuff that matters…because, as far as I know, Target doesn’t stock marriage bandaids or positive body image.
Take Yoga and talk…I guess that’s all I’m saying…That’s what I’ve learned from all these Dad Groups, now you don’t have to join them. You’re Welcome.