transcribing.a series of twitter threads i’ve written reflecting on being a dad

I.

feeding my kid at 5am sets off a series of thoughtfeels that brings me back to being 12, being in singapore’s gifted education program, being the only tamil/brown kid around as far as i can remember, and being told that my failure would be a disappointment to my entire community

the stress i was under then was immense, crushing, annihilating. it really seemed like all the adults in my life- my family, my teachers, my government, my country – conspired to make me as miserable as possible. it’s so weird to talk about but it’s the truth of how it felt to me

sometimes people ask me ~“how are you able to post your thoughts so publicly so freely” and the truth of it is quite grotesque– it’s that i was always subjected to overwhelming scrutiny in every room i was in. took me ~25 years of corroboration to feel confident in my assessment

like in many ways it was

“but they’ll kill you!”

“i am already dead”

i was a v dramatic child yeah but my life circumstances incited and catalyzed that drama

i remember being a silly lil guy when i was 8; everything changed when i passed that cursed test

but here’s the hilarious twist to it all: i met my wife there. and we made this lil guy. i will do everything i can to protect and nurture and encourage him in all the ways i wasn’t

II.

I was never really an animal person growing up. I was more into books, video games, music. I liked the idea of a pet maybe, but I knew it would be a lot of responsibility, and I knew I was a pretty irresponsible kid. also i think i has this sense that… “animals are dumb”?

i used to hang out at the void deck of a friend’s place, and sometimes a stray cat would come hang out with us. i developed some fondness for that cat, but it felt sort of superficial. like friendly relations with a shopkeeper, maybe. trivial niceties, pleasant but immaterial

after i got married, one day a neighborhood cat followed us home. i remember thinking, this fella seems really attuned to us. like he’s really… paying attention to us. i felt compelled to take him in and we quickly developed a real kinship

somehow we ended up with a 2nd cat too. i’ve learned so much from them. i learned to be patient, i relearned to be irreverent, i learned to pay attention to their subtle non-verbal cues. turns out pets have this whole universe of subtlety to them i never even perceived as a kid

my two cats have entirely different personalities, interests, inclinations, moods… i would never have guessed it as a kid, but I could now probably happily spend years just observing and getting to know cats, studying them, befriending them, getting to know them

but this is not actually a thread about cats, this is a thread about parenting every single thing ive learned from and about my cats applies here too. as a kid i didnt see how babies were interesting or fun. they just seemed like piles of poop and shrieks and responsibility

i now spend hours every day just paying attention to my newborn son, attuning with him, listening to his sounds, watching his face, his gestures, and it’s all so fascinating to me. every moment i feel like i’m learning something important about him– and by extension, myself

i do still remember what it was like to be relatively uninterested in babies. i think most of it was just that i had more pressing interests. eg when i hit puberty, i temporarily lost interest in books (lifelong passion!) because girls, peers and rock bands were more compelling

and i think that’s normal, and good. one day my son will lose interest in sitting around with me all day and that too is normal and good

III.

Witnessing lil baby *beginning to understand* things, reacting to things, following his eyes, there’s something very profound about it that’s hard to articulate. it’s like a minor form of beholding the dawn of creation. I get to witness a world being created from scratch

there’s something so intimate about it. it’s fair to say this is already the most intimate experience of my life. you can microdose it by hanging out with kids, and I do recommend that, and— full immersion is a different story because you get to be there as *all* of it unfolds

I’ve always been interested in people for as long as I can remember, and studying people has always been challenging– first because people are complicated, but also because it’s kind of rude and socially inappropriate to examine people. so you have to use all sorts of proxies…

but when it’s your own child, not only is it allowed, it’s highly encouraged! you can look at their little faces and bodies all day and watch them process every experience. newborns sometimes smile a beatific beam of satisfaction when they fart. there’s so much to learn

there’s a buildup to the breaking point of crying, and if you’re watching them closely enough you can notice it happening and actually intervene before it happens

my child has absolutely no tension in his neck and shoulders etc yet- it’s all softness, and there’s something about encountering softness that inspires and begets softness in me as well. you could say i’ve meditated more in the last week than in any preceding month of my life

it doesn’t feel appropriate to share pictures on main but i have all these lovely photos of his face in all sorts of expressions: quizzical, grumpy, wary, tormented, blissful, satisfied. again, he’s not even 2 weeks old and there’s all this rich complexity to discern, encourage

it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that while my wife and i are going to be providing support n scaffolding for this lil guy to survive, he is going to be teaching us a lot that we have forgotten/suppressed about what it means to want and not-want

IV.

i now get to confidently say things like “even newborn babies have internal conflicts”. part of me always suspected this but now i have intimate firsthand knowledge. there’s something liberating about this

somewhere along the way i think (another) part of me developed this idea: children are born innocent and pure and simple. society gets in our heads and fucks us up. until we return to pure idyllic bliss and clarity, we are fallen, lost, etc

this is half-useful and half-torment. it *is* partially true and i have a whole bunch of notes and anecdotes that support the above narrative. its not wrong, it’s just incomplete

the enlightened return-to-childhood mature adult isnt free from internal conflicts, perfectly fearless and unfazed etc. they are free from *illusions* about their conflicts. they are free from the pretense of idyll. they are free to be tense without being tense about being tense

my son helped me see this and has given me the gift of release. even more tension has melted from my face when i realize its ok to not be ok. i hope my writing might be able to pass some of this gift on to others in turn

V.

i went to dinner with a couple of old friends yesterday and someone said, i paraphrase, “you seem remarkably well-rested for a parent of a newborn”. i said thanks, my secret is that my sleep has been fucking terrible my whole life to begin with, lol

also, a newborn for me gives me incredible clarity of purpose. what does he need? gotta feed him, burp him, change his diapers, roughly every 3 hours. it’s challenging and disruptive sure but its *meaningful*. i’m *happy* to do it, even if i’m bleary-eyed half-asleep doing it

honestly i’ve had internet arguments more frustrating than being woken up by a screaming infant every few hours. that’s right, some of you are more annoying even through the screen. this lil guy at least eventually stops screaming

every day (and in the middle of every night lol) i wake up and i get to be of service to my wife and child. its a test of my temperance and grace. every day i find myself in a meditative state where i am to renegotiate what’s really important to me. it’s a spiritual experience

i love him more every day as i get to know him better, as we develop a shared understanding . i love my wife more every day as i witness her being my lil guy’s mom. i love myself more every day witnessing all of this. for me it’s less a sudden burst and more like growing tendrils

i’d mentally rehearsed for sth much worse than what i’m going through. i find myself laughing all the time. a baby is such an intrinsically funny creature. its a tiny guy who lives in your house but he’s small and tripping balls and loves boobs. its hilarious!! maybe im delirious

when i see the peace and absence of tension on my son’s face while he sleeps on my chest i realize i am a sanctuary, a wellspring, a tree with deep roots. he trusts me so completely. it is a profound honor

VI.

fatherhood continues to be the most fascinating experience of my life. day by day, i get to witness “new systems coming online” – he has marginally more grip strength now, more responsive to words, making more eye contact, becoming more opinionated, establishing personhood

in the first 2 weeks it felt like the thing that soothed him most was me pressing him against me. now it’s starting to seem like sometimes he likes it more when i let him slide off me and sorta just hang out beside me. little sproutings of sovereignty and autonomy

caring for him is caring for me. its a fresh education in attentiveness and responsiveness, to limits and satiety. even watching him get progressively more hungry and then slowly get full as he feeds is so instructive. there are sweet spots & goldilocks zones in everything

as hunger grows, there’s a period of time where he seems increasingly alert, and he seems to try to communicate with us with his eyes and mouth. he gets increasingly frenetic with this, and eventually it crosses a threshold where it’s all too much for him and he starts wailing

the moment feeding starts, he’s able to completely relinquish all the tension in his face and body to focus on feeding. it’s kind of spooky how sudden and dramatic the shift is. and he is very focused initially. but after a while, this starts to trail off and he loses interest

and as i witness all of this i just find myself thinking, of course. of course everything is like this. i’m like this too. thank you son for reminding me. i could stand to be more attentive to the waxing and waning of my own interests and disinterests, desires and discomforts.

It’s funny- i started writing this thread when he slid off me, and i thought to myself “gosh he’s becoming independent so fast”. but by the end of the thread he started crying and grasping for me so now he’s back on me again :’)

here too, cycles in everything, freedom vs security

SLEEP SIDETHREAD

3 weeks in, my sleep as a newborn-parent who wakes up every couple of hours is actually better than my sleep was as a teenager, or my sleep when i was working on my 2nd book. funnily i would describe both of those eras as me parenting myself

i was chainsmoking cigarettes& chugging coffee/redbull, my entire nervous system was fried to shit and i still couldnt sleep, body felt like it was being carpet bombed with cortisol. wake up feeling 5% batt now im bleary-eyed but joyful and i enjoy the fragmented sleep i do get

the hard thing both about teenhood and working on my book- and the third thing would be my depression around age 24/25– is the sense that i couldnt know if i was doing the right thing. was i wasting my life? was i setting myself up for greater failure and disappointment?

whereas with a newborn kid its comparatively so clear what the right action is. i sleep great knowing that i’m actually doing my best certainly not vacation-quality uninterrupted sleep, but i actually dont spend hours tossing and turning anxiously, which is a relief

the hardest periods of my life, correlated with the worst sleep, were when everything seemed meaningless and i had a real risk of unaliving myself parenting is logistically disruptive, but for me personally it all feels meaningful and my will-to-live has never been stronger

VII.

about a month after i got married, i remember still accidentally referring to my wife as my girlfriend, out of habit. there’s something similar with having a kid. sometimes people say things like “i was afraid i wouldn’t feel a gushing love my child overnight” and like, yea,

it takes time to get to know a person! even if u could know a lot about them beforehand (this happens for me with new friends with extensive bodies of work– we can read each other’s stuff and speedrun years of shared understanding), it takes time to weave a relationship together

there have been moments in the past month where i sort of micro-forgot that I have a son. i go to the toilet or something, and i come back out and i’m like oh man, there’s a kid here! that’s my kid! wife and i keep jokingly asking each other “who’s this guy?” “your son!” “omg”

it’s so much fun. i love him so much. i catch glimpses of his personality in the patterns in his facial expressions and his body language and i’m so excited to discover more of it. his hands are already a little bigger than they were a couple of weeks ago

i am also falling in love with my wife all over again watching her be a mom. generally in our relationship i tend to be the annoying cheery optimist and she’s the grumpy cynic (and I love that about her), but when she sings and coos to our son i melt into a puddle of sunshine

thinking about the world in relation to my son also has had a nice clarifying effect. i find myself thinking about what sort of example i am setting. i find myself wanting to take him on morning walks even though i am not a morning person. I find myself wanting to work out so “daddy’s tired” is hopefully never a bottleneck to anything. it’s all been wonderful for me, so far. grateful and hashtag blessed etc

caring for him is caring for me. I had previously inherited and internalized some amount of the idea that feeding and cleaning diapers etc are the tedious, unpleasant parts of parenting. but for me they quickly became the most meaningful. each time I do it I reaffirm to him and to myself that I care, and that caring is a privilege and a joy not a burden. this itself may be a privileged perspective but I am a privileged person

VIII.

2 months in, i sometimes still cant believe my son is real. i look at his face and i see both myself and my wife. in his smiles i see the most profound beatific bliss. when he cries i feel gratitude for the opportunity to be the caring, nourishing presence i wish i had had

i love holding him. i love carrying him around. i love watching him sleep. i love feeding him and burping him and changing his diapers. every part of this is such a culmination of everything i have thought and known and felt and believed. its the most divine creative project

witnessing my wife be his mother makes me fall in love with her all over again too, harder and more deeply and in more dimensions and nuance than ever before. our home used to be so quiet, now i hear her singing and cooing to him and it is so joyous

there are moments where i notice expressions on his face where i can see glimpses the man he will someday become. there is a whole person in there, piecing himself together, and i get to help!!

every moment with him has me revisiting, re-relating, renegotiating my own self-concept, my own understanding of myself. and my understanding of people, and the world. everything is alive again, everything is of significance

i cant wait to give him his first taste of lemon i cant wait to bring him to the zoo and show him a giraffe i cant wait to have a family groupchat i cant wait to hear what he thinks about everything there’s so much to look forward to

IX.

4 months. he slept pretty well through the night, woke up crying, i changed him and fed him and put him back to sleep within an hour, which felt really great so i wanted to capture that feeling and write more about how it’s been going

he’s already noticeably different than he was two months ago. he’s a little bigger, sturdier. he vocalizes more, which means more giggles but also shrieks. he grasps more purposefully at things, both with his hands and his eyes, it’s a joy to witness

one thing that changed “for the worse” for me was- he used to fall asleep so easily when i cradled him in my arms, sideways. sometime in the last couple of weeks he started to really dislike that (cries, sometimes even screams), which made me feel comparatively helpless…

i found that when i held him “over my shoulder”, he’d quieten down, but in that position he is SO alert. which is a blessing in some ways, and adorable, but completely undesirable at bedtime (laugh emoji). i started to worry id never be able to get this kid to sleep. he was up all night once

but then yesterday from some trial-and-error i held him upright pressed against my chest and he promptly dozed off. i tried it again earlier and it worked again. maybe this wont last either but for the moment i feel absolutely triumphant

i love him so much i look forward to when we can walk together holding hands and i look forward to when he doesnt want to do that anymore i look forward to everything i have never been happier or more sleepy (which is incredible for an insomniac lol) my turn to zzz

gn