hao.mortgage

I had a child last week, which is to say that my wife had a child last week after incubating it for thirty-nine weeks. I watched and encouraged her and held her legs. I made grilled cheeses, I built a crib, and I went to Dyker Heights to buy a used Snoo¹. But, really, my wife did the hard work.

According to L.A. Paul’s Transformative Experience, having a child and becoming a vampire are “epistemically transformative” (you cannot know what it is like to have a child or to convert to a new religion or try a new career until you live them) and “personally transformative” (your preferences and identity will change after the experience).

Two years prior to watching a baby emerge from his wife,, N.Y. Hao started a Slack channel at work for parents in the NYC office. It started out as the seven people at the lunch table who were interested in the topic, and it stayed in the 10-30 range for a year. Then it crossed some kind of word-of-mouth event horizon and membership shot up to 100-200, absorbing more or less all the people who would be interested; now membership ticks up steadily as new employees find the channel or as existing employees convert into parents.

In a group of high-achieving 300 parents, one or two will have the ambition and agency to maintain a Google Doc comparing air quality monitors for new parents²; the Slack channel aggregates and encourages that kind of sharing. And, like any online community, 10% of the members of the channel post 90% of the content – but, I think, the idea of having an audience and an opportunity to post the content is what partially motivates the 10% of active contributors. Having done very little, I gained a lot. People wrote up advice about schools and Snoos and transitioning the teenagers to smartphones in response to questions. But most questions about children a little sensitive: parenting is contextual, and the context is usually where the parents live, how much spending power they have, and what their implicit values are. And so I got the sense — backed up by the few questions I myself ventured — that most answers happened in direct messages, away from the public channel. That is OK. I think one of the best takeaways from the Slack channel was the questions themselves. Learning to ask which questions is, I think, as hard as learning the answers to those questions. I commonly thought, I’m glad someone asked that question, as I never would have thought of it in the first place.

I also talked to a few parents in person. Antonio ballparked that it was about 60% as hard to have a second baby once you’ve had a first. Sonny told me the pregnancy was the last chance for either of us to routinely exercise. Ian told me to have the breast pump’s flanges sized before delivery happened; this was and is excellent advice, as we pumped with the wrong flanges for about a week until a good lactation consultant put us on the right path.³ Everybody seemed generally positive about the public schools in their neighborhood. I talked to a few people who grew up in NYC, but their memories were centered more around the teenage years. You can drink until 4am and then feed yourself with a bagel from a street cart before going home on the subway. (It is heartening to know that the people who did this, and barfed, are now directors of local museums and other kinds of well-paid professionals.)

So what did I know of labor and delivery? Most of the useful information I had came from the ACOG book. Whereas many preganancy and childbirth books try to put a fun spin on the process⁴, the ACOG book is no-nonsense, repeats itself as needed, and can be read quickly. In short, a good reference material. The book pairs well with the AAP book on what to do with the child once he’s out of the womb and in your arms. Neither book adequately covered the difficulties of feeding and lactation. For that, we went to a IBCLC-certified lactation consultant in our neighborhood; we should have gone earlier. Likely there’s a no-nonsense book on feeding out there as well, and we should have found one beforehand. The hospital tries to give you pamphlets and schedule quick 30-minute sessions with their IBCLCs, but it’s the day after birth and energy levels / memory retention capabilities are low.