The mentals of being a parent

I’ve been really trying to find words to describe why parenthood is so hard. Lots of my friends are going through the journey of their first kid soon and it’s been more difficult than I expected to help prep them.

I’m 16 months in now and while I finally feel like I’m on stable footing, it was not an easy journey. The combination of everything really makes things difficult.

Of course the lack of sleep is big especially in the early days. But at least for me in the early days, I was able to power through with just pure adrenaline and knowing that I had to keep a child alive.

For me, things really got hard right around the 6 month mark and that lasted for about 6 months. As I reflect back on it, the biggest challenge for me personally was the mental aspect. All my free time became my kid’s time now. It was never about me for really the first time in my life.

I think it hit me hard at 6 months because that’s really when the adrenaline and the initial excitement of being a father really wore off. The initial excitement of buying him awesome clothes and cuddling with him wore off at the same time that I started to long for more personal time.

In other words, reality set in that this was my life now around that 6 month mark. And it took me almost half the year to really adjust and get used to that new reality. No weekend golf. No going out to dinner. Weekends are for playgrounds and kid activities. It was a big change.

Of course I’m likely in the majority of parents. At the same time, I’d imagine things were a bit harder for me because I was still very much living a different life prior to having a kid than a normal parent. I’d imagine there are many homebody couples that were already staying in the majority of time and going to bed at 10pm, and waking up at 6am.