Excerpt from Chapter Three, FAMILY: Adoring ME ...

My sister-in-law was working in the kitchen after taking my 8 year old niece to school.  Upstairs, my ornery 3 year old nephew, your classic under-sized, silent-but-deadly smooth operator, was plotting his next move.  With the nimbleness of a ninja, he scurried into the bathroom and planted an unknown substance deep within the bowels of the toilet plumbing, and with a devilish smirk of smug self-satisfaction, detonated the drainage disaster by flushing before quickly disappearing into the dark recesses of his room.  When my brother took the phone call from his wife, he could hear commotion in the background – raging torrents of water rushing down the 1st floor living room wall, through the floor and into the basement where it poured onto wrapped Christmas presents in storage.

They finally managed to get the water stopped, but not before the damage had been done.  How much damage, you ask?  Oh, after the toilet replacement, 2nd story bathroom floor remodel, plumbing maintenance, living room ceiling and wall repairs, basement ceiling patch and Christmas present exchange, somewhere in the neighborhood of $5,000-$7,000.  Happy Holidays.

These kinds of moments are not confined to my brother’s family; anyone who has been a parent can tell you their own horror stories.  For us, it could be Bristol taking crayons and markers to her sister Addie’s brand new quilt, or Addie playing in the toilet and stuffing entire rolls of toilet paper into the plumbing, or Grayson’s uncanny ability to produce projectile vomit the moment you get your dress shirt on.  A simple cost/benefit analysis, used in the business world when determining wise and unwise investments, makes the choice of having a family seem extremely ill-advised from a personal perspective.

Writing at the entertaining Dad vs. Wild blog, one dad laid it bare:

The costs (of parenthood): Time, Money, Energy, Sanity.  Everything.

The benefits: Perpetuating the human race, Paying it forward (raising someone since someone else raised us), Paying it backward (we change their diapers, they might change ours), Cheap labor (kids are dumb enough to fool them into doing your work for candy), Reliving our own childhood (socially acceptable immaturity).

And this doesn’t even mention what happens to your vacations.  After we got married and before we had kids (a span of 3 years), Jenny and I made about 6 trips to Walt Disney World.  We owned those parks; we’d get there early, zip around slow families with strollers, eat on the run, and stay until they closed early in the morning.  Long lines were never an issue because we would just skip it and move on quickly to something else.  We were mobile, agile, and smart.  And to be honest, we laughed at the predictable scene of screaming kids being shouted down by their angry mother threatening, “We didn’t pay $5,000 for you to not enjoy this.  This is the most magical place on earth, so start acting like it!” 

On one of our pre-kid vacation videos, we are walking and laughing on our way to the bus stop when a mid-30s aged, slightly pudgy man comes flying past us with a doublewide stroller.  He looks half mad, half on the verge of heat stroke.  He’s chasing his wife who has sprinted up to the bus with one leg inside the door, one leg outside, motioning for this poor man to “hurry.”  Jen and I audibly chuckle on the video.  We aren’t chuckling anymore.
 
Since having kids, we have made another 4 or 5 trips to Disney.  And it’s been, in a word, embarrassing.  Now we are the ones getting zipped around, the ones standing in brutally long 3 hour lines just so some random man in a mouse costume can sign a paper my daughter is holding.  On our last trip, as the bus pulled up to our stop and we yanked our two kids out of our own tandem stroller, I threw our park bags over my shoulders while Jen grabbed the camera bag and two kids.  I snapped into Indy 500 Pit Crew mode as I broke the stroller down, folded it up, threw it over my head and jumped onto the bus just before the crowd pressing in from behind trampled me.  As we sat down on the bench inside the bus, Jen looked at me with a smirk and said, “Remember our video?”  I had become that dad.

But why?  Why would we choose that for ourselves?  Why would anyone?  Through the lens of self-focus and self-empowerment, it makes no sense...kids are just not a viable option.  They are nothing but a hindrance to your marriage, your romance, your travel, your sleep, your leisure, your bank account, your everything.  That’s what the insurance guys mean when they call them “dependents.”  Kids are the barnacles on your ship of life.  And science even proves that they destroy your happiness.

In her widely read piece in New York Magazine entitled, “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting,” Jennifer Senior affirms that, “Most people assume that having children will make them happier.  Yet a wide variety of academic research shows that parents are not happier than their childless peers, and in many cases are less so.”
 
Even pro-family academics and advocates who try to spin that research in a positive way aren’t very successful.  Senior tells about a Scottish paper that was published in the Journal of Happiness Studies that proudly reported, “Contrary to much of the literature, our results are consistent with an effect of children on life satisfaction that is positive, large and increasing in the number of children.”

Senior explains what happened next:

“A few months later, the poor author discovered a coding error in his data, and the publication ran an erratum (correction).  ‘After correcting the problem,’ it read, ‘the main results of the paper no longer hold.  The effect of children on the life satisfaction of married individuals is small, often negative, and never statistically significant.’”

Oops.  But truthfully, I don’t have any problem acknowledging these facts.  I think it makes complete and total sense.  This all comes down to our definition or understanding of the word “happiness.”  In modern vernacular, happiness is a temporary, fleeting, easily changed, moment by moment, and very self-centered reaction to circumstances.  I am happy when the Indianapolis Colts score a touchdown, and then really ticked off 30 seconds later when they give up a touchdown on the ensuing kickoff return. 

SOMETHING BEYOND HAPPINESS
But that’s not what parenthood and family are about.  Parenthood is a conscious decision to invest in something that doesn’t guarantee momentary happiness, but promises long term joy and purpose.  Take the Disney World example.  It is impossible to explain this to someone from an academic or scientific standpoint, but give me a long day in the hot Florida sun of standing in lines amongst rude and smelly adults...and watch all that stress fade away the moment I see Addie, Bristol or Grayson’s face when they catch a glimpse of Mickey and Donald walking towards them.  Give me a day of immense stress, nasty people, and obnoxious customers in the workplace, and follow it up with the whining and moaning of kids who missed their naps.  And watch it all disappear as they rest their head on my chest and their eyes drift into sleep.  Am I happy in those moments?  I guess.  But it’s something deeper and better than happiness...