Welcome to Father Times

A humbled dad's attempt at parenting.

There’s no shame in the truth: parenting is really hard. 

My wife and I have two daughters: a two-and-a-half-year-old toddler demon who knows exactly when to turn on the charm to avoid emancipation, and a six-month-old baby who is angelic until it is time to sleep. I love my kids. My kids might love me. But that doesn’t take away from the reality that most of the time, especially in the trenches of early childhood, parenting is really hard. 

My path to becoming a dad didn’t start on the best note. In the months leading up to the birth of our older daughter, COVID was raging, we were stuck inside, and my wife and I were still coming to terms with the loss of her first pregnancy. The ‘magic’ of the process didn’t feel magical at all. 

And, hey, I was scared shitless. As I was staring down the barrel of an umbilical stump on a virtual parenting course, I realized that I knew next to nothing about what was to come. I was aware that this was a moment of enlightenment that nearly every expecting first-time parent had, but that brought little relief. 

Then came the actual birth process. Our daughter’s entrance was marred by a cord web that required a blaring hospital alarm, a medical SWAT team, and a stay in the NICU that came with a frightening lack of updates and a stone-cold nurse who still haunts me. 

My wife didn’t fare much better, with postpartum complications that neither of us was prepared for. Why would we be? Nobody expects to go into the delivery room and be faced with questions about survival.

Without getting into the details, we were incredibly lucky to have a happy ending. We brought our daughter home after a sleepless, three-night hospital stay, with more anxiety than anticipated but also with even more appreciation and gratitude for the miracle of childbirth. I can’t tell you the number of times I thought about how different things would have been had the same scenario unfolded 75 years ago. 

So now we’re home with a newborn, and I finally get to apply the learnings from my online courses that we watched while eating dessert in bed. Except this time I have a living, breathing, fragile human that is a lot more complicated in real life than on the computer. I had to change my first diaper, give my first night bottle, swaddle my first swaddle. I needed some pointers. 

Like any millennial, I turned to the world’s most reliable source for help: the internet. It did not help. Have a question? Here are infinite conflicting answers ranging from medication recommendations to advice on how to improve the magnetic frequencies of your nursery. Looking for some support in the form of other struggling new parents? Here’s someone on TikTok showing how they flawlessly get nine kids ready for school in the morning.* 

We get it - it’s socially unacceptable to call it anything but a blessing. But while I was getting blessed by tears (mine and hers) and piss (just hers), I wondered where the new parents were who didn’t have all of the solutions from the very beginning? 

The point here is that, more often than not, I just needed someone I could laugh with about how insane and unpredictable and terrifying and amazing parenthood really is. I found the people who were most honest about the experience to be the most trustworthy and empathetic. 

With Father Times, I’ll aspire to be like those people, and hopefully give you an avenue of humor through the good times and bad. I’ll share the lessons (in a non-dickish way, I promise)  that were learned the hard way and explain why, as long as you love your kids and exercise decent judgment, things will probably be okay. And I’ll link you to pieces of baby gear that my parents think are ridiculous but my friends DM me about. 

Thanks for reading. 

*That isn’t to say I didn’t find any valuable resources. Emily Oster provided the pragmatic, data-centric voice we needed to make some tough calls early on. Precious Little Sleep by Alexis Dubief was a miracle worker to restore order in our lives. Just know that there are solutions out there, even if you have to dig through the trash to find them.