Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com.

This week, Giri answers a question about how parenting can reorient your life.

Anonymous:

My wife and I are new parents, and before our baby was born I decided I would become the full time stay-at-home parent. I wanted to give my kid a chance for an upbringing similar to mine, and luckily my wife's career should provide for the family. As my wife's maternity leave gets closer to its end, I'm excited but also anxious about what happens next. My wife's work will mean she travels a bit, and we don't have family in the area for backup support. While I'm prepared to be alone with the baby, I also wonder what the rest of my life will look like outside of being a parent. I have a long simmering writing project that I figure will take much more time now. I thought I was prepared for all of my priorities to change once the baby arrived, but I can't help but wonder how to find balance between being a parent and everything else. Is that even possible? Am I spiraling?

In the months before my child was born, I still remember feeling that I couldn’t really grasp the imminent changes to my life. What would it look like? Would that guy even be me? Would I lose connection with things I cared about? I was living in a stimulating city with a time-flexible job, lots of friends in my immediate vicinity, a tendency to take them up on spontaneous plans, and a fairly nocturnal and unstructured lifestyle. It was hard to imagine much of that surviving the transition to the Other Side. What would be left over?

If there’s one thing that helps diffuse general anxiety, it’s some other, more acute stressor. What helped me get out of my head was the need to finish the manuscript for my book, due about the same time as my firstborn child (can’t recommend this as a life-planning move). It felt urgent because I thought, correctly, that parenthood would make a certain type of work much more difficult: immersive, open-ended days spent researching, tinkering, drafting, daydreaming, “wasting” time in the ways that ultimately serve the writing, but make you feel kind of idiotic when you look back and tally up the minute-by-minute agenda. I spent many of the weeks leading up to the due date doing that kind of work, and I couldn’t wait to finally send the manuscript in, put it all behind me, and lounge around with my baby. Once the revisions were through, that's exactly what I happily did for many months of paternity leave. We had the best summer of my life.

I think that sudden burst of exertion was freeing. It allowed me to cleanly break away from a “need to work” mindset, which I would link not to grim capitalism or whatever but rather to that feeling of efficacy, agency, and flow that is pretty clearly intertwined with happiness. It was incidental that I got it from writing. A number of Defector readers probably get it from 1 out of 20 golf outings, or filling certain kinds of legal briefs. I soon realized you can get that feeling from parenting. When you slam into your pillow at the end of the day, uncertain of how soon you’ll have to wake up, but proud of your cobbled-together solutions to a question you’ll never grasp in its totality: How do you raise a living thing?

What’s nice is that a lot of the solutions seem to come unthinkingly. The peak moment of pure, purposeful flow I’ve experienced in the last two years was while sitting in the bath with my daughter as she released a surprise poop. Before conscious thought, I felt my limbs angling into action, rinsing her off and handing her off to my wife, grabbing a bucket to bail the turds into the toilet before they dissolved, all while minimizing turd-water spillage into the bathroom, and then cleaning the tub, and also myself. The brazen need to act immediatelysuperseded the dire millennial impulse to hand-wring and second-guess. What a feeling. I have experienced many more instances of clarity since. I suspect these scenarios will get more mentally challenging when my child is able to express ideas more complex than “belly button,” but hopefully my own skills will improve too.

You write about wanting to keep a long-simmering creative project going on the side; early on in parenting, I realized this was going to be the defining, long-simmering creative project of my life. You get to make a new life! Your family gets to design it together. Like any creative project, there are certain constraints—you’re going to feed, clothe, nap, shelter, and nurture that baby—but there’s a surprising amount that you get to figure out yourself. You’ve mentioned that you’d like to give your child an upbringing similar to your own, and you can aim at that. You can also make some adjustments at the margins. Every day is an opportunity to observe, experiment, delight, and clown around. I have definitely had bleary, checked-out days, like any other parent, but they’re actually even harder to get through than the ones where I’m equivalently tired but push myself to stay engaged. The more curiosity and care you bring to your child, the more rich fractal detail is revealed.

It’s fun to feel like you are getting better at parenting, which turns out to be a precarious feeling of accomplishment that is undone by the next developmental leap, like a well-designed game. I’ve just encountered “rolling and screaming toddler-style tantrums,” and I’m building out my skill tree to meet the challenge. Parenting is now something I do every day, without it ever really announcing or explaining itself. It’s just the substance of my life, as it will be yours. It no longer feels like this shapeless, all-consuming task as it did before I had a kid. It’s made up of a thousand little moves every day, most of which happen unthinkingly. I’m now over a year into it, and I have a clearer sense of its changes. Being a father has rewired my relationship with time; thrown my priorities into an almost stark crystalline order; made my old life feel distant, baggy, and listless. Every minute and decision matters much more now. Mostly, that feels good. I’m still the same guy I was before I had a child, except now I just have a beatific new creature to share many of those experiences with.

My day-to-day is different from yours: Both my wife and I work, and we send the baby to daycare, and spend the vast majority of the remaining time parenting side by side, which we really enjoy. But I do have the occasional solo day or evening, and I see them as side quests. It’s time to put this baby in a situation. Why don’t we walk into a new area of the park and roll around in dry autumn leaves for the first time in your life? Your mom’s not here to object—how about we soundtrack this bath time with some soothing black metal?

Then there are classics of the genre: How close to parity can we responsibly get while sharing this cup of ice cream? Can I manage to make “basketball” one of your first words? (Answer: yes.) Solo parenting can feel lonely, but I’m lucky to have a baby hellbent on getting out of the house and being in new spaces (and around new doggies), and I think that is due, at least partially, to having made it a habit from the very beginning. We tried to design a life that would make her curious about the world, minimize monotony, and let us all have fun. It worked! Though I’m aware that the current circumstances will not last forever, and I’ll need to keep adjusting as we go.

I occasionally feel the gnaw of wanting to work again on a challenging, wide-ranging project, the kind that spills over the confines of the daycare hours. I do sometimes miss the late nights lost to rabbitholes. I went on a residency before being a parent, and I thought, Huh, this is cute; now I see how it might be creatively essential. But one neat trick has been combining the parenting and side projects in one: I have a long-running journal, basically a detailed document of our life together, that has deepened my love for my child and also made me more adept at describing the texture of various bodily fluids. I don’t have as much unstructured time as I used to, but I’m also learning to excavate unseen new chunks of time from my day by, say, realizing how demonic my phone is.

My main feeling these days is that life has its seasons. This is the season of making animal sounds and cutting fruit into very small pieces. There will be time for other stuff, some day, but I’d like to bring everything I can to this. She’ll only be this small once, and I don’t want to miss any of it.