Becoming a parent

As the birth of Neville gets closer and closer, I have many people in my work life giving me advice on how much life will change for me. In the past I've tended to ignore these types of comments, mainly because none of those moments seem to live up to the hype of "life-changing." Don't get me wrong, I can look back at the last 10 years and see that lots of things have changed, but it's more of a gradual thing.

Oddly enough, my confirmation was one of the reasons (among several) that I drifted away from Catholicism between the ages of 16 and 22. The process as a whole did not really excite me. My older sister, Beth, had a wonderful experience throughout the whole year leading up to her confirmation, and always spoke highly of it. I couldn't stand the guy teaching my year (it was his first year, and he replaced the couple that had led Beth's class) and he said many things I either ignored for being unrealistic or thought was outright wrong. So in the end confirmation classes weren't nearly a good enough experience to

However, the biggest reason confirmation didn't turn out to be a life-changing event was probably because of the expected grand finale. We were told over and over that THE reason for confirmation was that the holy spirit would come to you at the moment of confirmation and you would feel his grace. At 16, I'm pretty sure I didn't know what to expect, but I did expect something. On that day, I didn't really feel anything.

Now, like I said, that was just one of the several reasons I drifted away from Catholicism, so maybe it wasn't a momentous occasion because I was already on my way out the door, and the holy spirit knew it. In any case, it lacked the oomph I was lead to believe. I saw it again when high school graduation came, as everyone said how different life was after high school. But again it was a more gradual change. I spent the summer after living in the same place, working in the same place, and hanging out with the same friends. The only thing that changed was not going to school, and it was summer so that seemed entirely normal.

Now, heading off to college probably had the biggest chance of being a specific event where life felt different from that point forward. And I certainly lived and worked in different places, and hung out with different people, from that point forward. But in terms of how I looked at life, how I viewed myself, I was pretty much a work in progress and I can't point to any one event as making a difference in how I approached life.

There are many other events, including engagement and wedding, where I was told that things would be different. In the end I always felt they were gradual processes changing me. It's probably a little bit because life is different now for a lot of people. (Thanks to Maggie Grumm-Albert for pointing this out.) My wedding didn't lead to a direct change in living conditions. I already had a lot of furniture, dishes, whatever. Yes, it was a major change. But I still feel like it didn't change the essence of Scoob.

But expecting a child, I can see how that will be a life-changing event. Over the last few years people have said how much it would change things, and because of how often people have been wrong before, I tended to ignore them. I guess after enough iterations of "Your life will never be the same" I just assumed that my laid-back approach to life made it so I never stressed about things, and thus was not changed. But this, this will be different.

It's going to change everything. I first thought about it when Cassandra and I were eating dinner with a CD playing and both of us reading a book. Nice, quiet evening. It hit me that come Neville's birth, those dinners will be few and far between for 20 odd years. I get so excited about all the things that I want to do with Neville, and all the activities that we'll get to do with her. I think about changing, feeding, caring for her as an infant. About playing with her as she gets older. Taking her to school, taking her to activities after school, worrying about her when she's no longer young enough for me to take her everywhere she goes. And it's clear that on or around December 3rd of this year my life will have a clear demarcation point: Pre-children, and Post-children.

And I couldn't be more excited.