Over a hundred years ago an American medical doctor performed an experiment to weigh the human soul. The number he came up with is the now infamous 21 grams. While this is scientifically uninteresting, it is still fascinating to even the most radical antitheistic rationalist. Try as we might—though I’d argue we shouldn’t—to remove the human element from science, there is one inescapable human inevitability: death.
The 21 gram soul nonsense is often used as proof for life after death, or at least out of body experiences. But it turns out you don’t need any of that pseudoscience to existentially experience your own death. I know this because I died once. And, it was having kids that killed me.
The difficulty of raising children is a constant theme of the blogsphere and Twitterverse. There is no shortage of lamentations. These are often met with both harsh criticism and earnest sympathy. The exhausted parent is shamed on one side and lauded for their honesty on the other.
The great thing about your own death is you hardly remember it. And, maybe I shouldn’t talk about like it was mine, as if I own it. It was his death and I can only pity him because, honestly, I don’t get why it was such a terrible thing anymore. But I’ll continue to talk about it as if it were my own past because in a literal sense it is, and it would just be awkward reading otherwise. Or, poetry.
Before children, I was a work hard, play hard college student. I had infinite freedom and I took advantage of every minute of it. Basically, I was the worst candidate to have real responsibilities, and there is nothing like the responsibility of being handed a helpless baby when you’ve never held a child in your life. Seriously, the nurse hands you the baby, says, “congratulations, dad,” and then everyone leaves the room. What the fuck? What I am supposed to do with this? If you want to see the definition of karma, hand a 27-year-old college student who sleeps 10 hours a night until noon a newborn infant.
But, like I said, I hardly remember it. Today I am woken up at 5:00am to a creepy child silhouette—like, how long have you been standing there?—which whispers as soon as it knows I’m awake, “can I watch a movie?” 7 years and he doesn’t know that he’d get an infinitely more favorable response if he had coffee in his hand. But, the thing is, now I love mornings. There is a calm about sunrise that you don’t experience the rest of the day.
There are so many things about life that being a parent has taught me to enjoy, and many that it has forced me to realize are not important. Sure, you lose a lot of freedom. You can’t play Xbox or binge-watch reality TV every night or have those loud friends over. But, those shows were trash anyway and are people that get grumpy because they can’t drink all your beer until 2am anymore really your friends?
Like a phoenix risen from the ashes, with children I am reborn. Now, where is daddy’s coffee?
