He Comes With
Before it became a cliché, and well before it became a nagging, static refrain, it felt a little like solidarity. “Enjoy it while it lasts,” the bedraggled parents of children a hundred days older than ours would tell us. We heard it from family and friends upon news of his conception, we heard it from strangers as soon as my partner started showing, we’ve heard it since the day he entered the world and nearly every day since. We waited with invisible vultures circling our personal lives for the inevitable day to come where we’d have to pack in our freedom and succumb to infinite domesticity. It’s been nearly 14 months now, and that day is yet to come.
Ever since our favorite little accident was a confirmed conception, we decided ardently to make sure ‘accident’ didn’t equal ‘mistake.’ No martyrdom complex. Why we live in a day and age where we’ve agreed compulsively to speak about our children like lifestyle terrorists, as if they had chosen to be conceived specifically to ruin their parents’ lives, is beyond me. Even more confusing is why people feel compelled to verbalize that, “Raising a child is difficult,” any more than they feel compelled to state, “You can buy milk at the grocery store.” These things are known, and have been known by all sentient humans from the moment they are able to retain information. To do well at a hard thing is to accept its difficulty and to deal with it.
It would be dishonest to say, however, that our parenting was hatched out of some righteous mission to smash the zeitgeist of child-induced stress. We are stressed out, as hell, all of the time. The two reasons we carry ourselves as we do as parents is in response to some inconvenient variables. Some financial calamity combined with the fact that our parents and siblings are scattershot around the Midwest has made finding a reliable babysitter difficult, to say the least. Whether it’s indulging in the crispy-skinned Duck à l’Orange in the trenchantly romantic trappings of Fauntleroy, or getting lost in the Oxtail Khao Poun in the more casual Vientiane Noodle Shop, the dynamic remains the same: he comes with. For the record, both of the aforementioned dishes are insanely and explosively delicious and demand your attention now. Like, right now.
Ultimately accepting the seismic change that comes with being a new parent comes with one of two choices: wallow in the cloud or let the silver lining shine. My home has insisted on the latter and the results have been blinding. By inviting our little one with us into the experiential deep end, we have cultivated an attitude in him unphased by the hustle and bustle of a busy service, and a curiosity for what it yields. We’ve shared the food, the laughs, the memories and the satisfied rides home. And no, we haven’t deluded ourselves into believing that our 13-month-old son is imbued with an advanced palate and a profound appreciation for a culture he can’t yet comprehend; but there is a sense that like all things immersive, he will take away something positive by coming along.
Dear fellow fledgling parents, you spend your whole life giving. Sleep deprivation, the abysmal domestic routine baked in to raising an infant, learning to look at the grocery store or the drive to and from work as being your only break in the day; these are the harsh realities that presented themselves to us when we became Mom and Dad. Waiting for the exact right variables to shake out so that we could go into the world as the prim and proper diners we used to be simply became unsustainable, so he comes with. If there’s an extravagance to be had and we can swing a post-dinner Amari or the Escargot Bourguignons by skirting the cost of a caretaker, he comes with. Pretty much no matter what we do, he comes with. And we wouldn’t have it any other way.
