10 Lessons from the First Year of Parenthood
This piece originally appeared on Lodro’s Substack: The Laundry
On Monday members of my online community, The Basic Goodness Collective, gathered for our monthly social. Often the best gatherings of this sort are exactly that: less my trying to offer significant Buddhist wisdom and more meditators socializing with other meditators.
One community member shared that she starts each day with a gratitude contemplation. I nodded knowingly, as I do as well.
“Then at the end of the day I reflect on how things went and journal.”
I asked her if there was a question or prompt that would spark the journaling.
She replied, “What have I learned today?”
I felt inspired by this question and, given that our daughter turned 1 the other week, I would like to offer the top ten things I’ve learned this year:
1) The simplest moments are actually the most profound
We have taken some big, complex trips with Ruby in her first year, but frankly laying on the bed and gazing at each other have been some of the most joyful moments of the past twelve months. Because she is a baby, most moments together are not complicated.
Each day has a thousand simple moments like lazing about: feeding her a bottle, rolling around with the dog, or repeatedly lifting her overhead. When I am relaxed and present for them, they feel extraordinary. The “extra” part of these ordinary moments is just the fact that I’m fully there for them.
2) Show people that you love them often
This one-year-old will hug you with her entire tiny body and it’s a beautiful display of love. She perks up when Adreanna or I walk into the room and breaks out into a smile that consumes her face. She says “mama” or “dad” with such tenderness and happiness.
She does not yet have the words to say, “I love you” and yet she shows us her love all the time.
3) Disaster will strike without warning
We really do think of ourselves as cautious parents. And yet, Ruby is a baby. She will find ways to fall off a couch or someone will put something near her and she will reach for it and cause herself injury or something else entirely. Disaster has struck a few times and I marvel at her resilience and ability to bounce back. If she can shrug off disaster so fluidly at 1 then I can follow suit at 41.
4) Moments of profound joy are fleeting; enjoy them
Our evening routine consists of Adreanna getting Ruby ready for bed while I reset our home from the mundane disasters that have struck it each day. At some point I will come upstairs to wish her goodnight, blowing a raspberry kiss on her belly and she will HOWL in delight, laughing.
Moments later, when I’m back downstairs, she realizes that I brought her a bottle and she isn’t being offered it yet; I might then hear sobbing.
Over time I cling to those moments of howling laughter and tend to forget the whining cry.
5) Letting resentment linger only hurts yourself
Adreanna told me once that divorce rates spike in the first few years of a baby’s life. I thought to Google this fact but determined it felt like opening a door to bad possibilities so we will just have to trust her on this one.
She and I talk about how our relationship has shifted in this first year, when us two very independent people had to develop a shared calendar just to determine who was working and who was holding the baby in a given hour. I think we’ve weathered this first year quite well, and credit part of it to something she pointed out a few months back: we don’t hold on to the everyday resentments.
Sometimes I will set up the nursery and later on go to put the baby down for a nap, only to see that the room has been reconfigured to undo my work. At those times, I notice an old lingering voice of resentment rise up in me, prompting me to remember every similar minor inconvenience of the last few weeks and yet…thank goodness for my meditation practice as I can acknowledge that voice, let it go, and focus instead on nap time.
The Buddha once said that hanging onto resentment and other forms of anger is like holding a hot coal: only you get burned. Better to put the coal down quickly.
6) New things are often only scary because they are new
Everything is new for Ruby and she is often fearless. The other day we were at a farm and I caught a horse out of the corner of my eye. I pointed it out to Ruby, who simply looked stunned. She’s seen horses in books and we’ve made neighing noises at her, but to see a horse in person…it felt like she was meeting a celebrity. She seems to like most new things (an exception: she was gifted a small ball pit for her birthday that is sitting next to my desk right now and thus far she is thoroughly terrified of sinking into it).
I remember when we were discharged from the hospital after her birth. Adreanna and I cautiously emerged from the room we had inhabited for the past few days. They had done a “car seat test” on Ruby and thus determined that she was able to sit in a car and come home with us. I, however, had no fucking clue how to put her in a car seat. I did my best and approached the nurse station with her (in her car seat) cradled in my arms. “Can someone just check my work here and let me know if I did this right?” I asked.
Most of the nurses looked perplexed at my abject terror. Listen: we had gone through a lot to get this kid here and I had no interest in messing it up on the ride home. One kind nurse did a gentle tug on the straps and nodded. “Looks good,” she said. I unclenched.
Earlier today I thought about how fluent I am in this process now. If I was cast on a Japanese game show and the final prize could only be won by me, blindfolded, putting a child in a car seat I would win the dishwasher for sure.
I no longer fear the act of driving with a baby on board and Ruby likely will one day get over the fear of falling forever into a sea of balls. Some things take time.
7) Quality time with loved ones will always trump “the work”
Adreanna read the first twenty pages of the new Miranda July novel and told me it was about parenthood so I quickly began consuming it. While it’s not not about parenthood, The New York Times did call it “the First Great Perimenopause Novel.”
In this book our protagonist (who is either entirely Miranda July or 95% based on her) keeps talking about how important “the work” is. The work is described as being in conversation with God through her writing and she mentions a few times that “the work” is paramount — much more significant than family or other worldly concerns.
I appreciate her as a writer, and understand what she’s driving at, but a lesson for me in this last year has been that quality time with Ruby or Adreanna is what fuels any of my good work. The work has never felt more secondary to that quality time for me. And to be clear: I love my work. This right now? Writing for all of you? The most fun I’ve had all day. But Ruby yelling nonsense at me, demanding to eat an entire banana after I have already fed her a full bowl of oatmeal? That’s a level of unbridled joy that feels sacred.
8) Ritual can be of great comfort during times of stress
As someone who has maintained a meditation practice that includes ritual, which has itself existed within a morning ritual for years, I am no stranger to ritual.
In the morning Ruby and I will get up together, feed the cats and make coffee before the two of us cuddle up on the couch. That daily ritual? That is just as sacred as any meditation ritual I have experienced.
For Ruby, the nap time ritual of closing the curtains, turning up the sound machine, and having a bottle together before sleep is seemingly what allows her to let go of whatever crankiness was just present and subsequently relax. Rituals have power.
9) I may never be as present as I would like (until I’m present all the time)
Granted, if I was fully present all the time I would be an enlightened buddha. So the compassionate side of me will say that I am a buddha-in-training. There are moments when I find myself reaching for my phone while she munches on breakfast or composing this very piece of writing in my head while taking her out to play with the dogs. I am more present with her today than I was yesterday and will strive to be more present tomorrow. This will continue to be a work in progress.
10) The greatest loves of your life are never expected
The one part of this whole year that I can’t quite articulate is the way love feels different now. Not just my love for Ruby, but the love I have for my wife who is also her mother or the love for my friends who have been so supportive or the love for humanity who is suffering so much this last year. My heart is very wide open in ways I would not have predicted and find hard to explain just yet.
Years ago, I went through a broken engagement and thought to myself, “I will never love like that again.” And you know what? I was right. I fell in love with a different woman and married her and that love is different than what I had before and it’s wonderful. But this? This love of a baby who has no real ability to hold a conversation? It’s the greatest love and totally different than other forms of love I’ve experienced to date. I don’t know what I expected here, but this isn’t it. It’s different.
As you can tell, while these lessons have been learned in the first year of being a parent, they are not limited to being a parent. They are somewhat more universal than that. I am sure there are a thousand more lessons that will come about in subsequent years with this being, but I hope these initial ten resonate with you and that you will find them helpful.
This piece originally appeared on Lodro’s Substack: The Laundry. For more of his recent writing, check out The Laundry today.
Lodro Rinzler is the award-winning author of 7 books including The Buddha Walks into a Bar and Take Back Your Mind: Buddhist Advice for Anxious Times. He has taught meditation for 20 years in the Buddhist tradition, is the co-founder of MNDFL meditation studios and travels frequently for his books, having spoken across the world at conferences, universities, and businesses as diverse as Google, Harvard University and the White House. Named one of 50 Innovators Shaping the Future of Wellness by SONIMA, Rinzler’s work has been featured in The New York Times,The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, FOX, CBS, and NBC. He lives in upstate New York with his wife Adreanna, daughter Ruby, and a menagerie of small animals. lodrorinzler.com
