Something new
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 legs1. I made grilled cheeses, I built a crib, and I went to Dyker Heights to buy a used Snoo2. 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 parents3; 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.4 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 useful to know that the people who did this, and barfed, are now directors of local museums and well-paid software engineers.)
Everybody agreed that kids in NYC grow up faster. This lined up with my years of tutoring at 826 NYC writing center5: past a certain age, some teens (especially the girls) had at least one foot in the sphere of adulthood already, two or three years prior to college. One was competing in local mixed-martial arts competitions. Another was