letting go
One perk of having a daughter is seeing certain tendencies in her that make it easier to forgive them in myself. Like me, my daughter is cautious and perfectionistic. She didn't even try to take her first steps until she was almost eighteen months old, several months after most of her friends were walking on their own. She just sat and watched and waited, and then one day she nearly nailed it on her first attempt. There's something very cool about that, and many of my favorite heroes have had that quality of effortless performance. But I also know that it's not the best way to be. You learn much faster if you aren't afraid of failure. Over a lifetime, people who are willing to fail have an almost insurmountable advantage over people who aren't. I have to wonder what I could have been without that fear.
But the point is that she was born that way, and that means that I was probably born that way too. For years I've known about this flaw in myself and wondered what had made me that way. Did I have too much pride? Was it that my parents praised me for being smart instead of trying hard? Or was something else wrong with my identity formation? But now I know that it wasn't any of that. Eighteen months old is not old enough for those things to take hold. Given that her environment and upbringing were as good as I could make them, my daughter was just born like that, and I was too.
There's a sense of relief for me in this realization, which is kind of revealing in itself. You could imagine someone having the opposite reaction: I was born with this personality flaw, what a tragedy, that means it will be even harder to overcome. But for me, it means that it wasn't anyone's fault. Maybe it doesn't have to be fixed. If it had to be fixed, it would be another burden, another item on the endless and staggering list of things to do. The delta between what I could've been and how I actually turned out would be that little bit wider.
This obsession with control. My wife tells me that she didn't know how neurotic I could be for many years after we first got together, because I was quite relaxed most of the time. I really just felt like I had everything under control. The illusion shattered the first time she watched me plan a guest list for a party, obsessing over gender ratio, who would bring partners or friends, which subgroups would mix and who would mix them, who were the big risks for getting into arguments. The thing is that you actually really can control those things, or at least influence them. It's just that it makes you crazy to try.
It seems like everything is like that. Six weeks before my daughter was due, we were in the doctor's office monitoring my wife's preeclampsia. The doctor wrapped up the ultrasound and said that things were probably okay and we just should just monitor at home and got up to leave. What exactly should we monitor, I pressed. The doctor rattled off a half-dozen symptoms, sounding annoyed: headache, dizziness, loss of vision, blood pressure. I interrupted again, what was that threshold for blood pressure? I pointed out that the nurse had just measured it and we were already over the threshold. Suddenly the doctor sat up and seemed to actually see me for the first time. She called to the nurse to confirm. Ten minutes later we were admitted to the hospital for an emergency delivery.
What if I hadn't noticed and we had gone home instead? Or conversely, what if I had been able to notice earlier that the measuring cuff we had at home was miscalibrated? What if I had insisted that my wife needed to take things easier during the pregnancy instead of fielding every stupid phone call? Could things have gone so much better, or so much worse?
Everything is like this. My friend Noah says that neuroticism is the universal substitute for any other virtue. If you aren't good enough naturally, you can just worry about it more instead. And if you're capable of doing that and you don't step up, and then things go wrong, doesn't that make it your fault?
I said that having a daughter has made it easier to forgive myself. It's a strange way to react, because the stakes have never been higher. There's nothing more important to me than her turning out well: happy, healthy, kind, able to care for herself and others. But at the same time, she makes me realize how impossible it would be to foresee and control those ends.
Every decision has a dozen butterfly effects. I learned every trick for how to feed and burp her after she was born early so that she'd make up for her lacking weight, but then she developed a bottle aversion because I'd forced it too hard and then she didn't eat for three days. Chastened by the over-intervention, we put off her sleep training for far too long and then she screamed almost continuously for a week when we finally had to do it. We needed extra help in the early months because we hadn't planned for such a tough early birth, and the woman who stepped up only spoke Mandarin, so now our baby is bilingual (something that we'd never even hoped for, given the sorry state of our own Chinese).
A short trip to see her cousins led to the whole family getting four respiratory infections in a row and the worst sleep regression she's ever had, and I was waking up with her every night again for a month. I worried about how moving to New York for work would affect our family, but instead it opened up a whole new world of playgrounds and music classes and nanny circles for her, and made her a hundred times more sociable and excited than she'd ever been in LA. Her best friend now is the daughter of a girl I met at a party many years ago, a woman I was blind-matched with based on the scent of our shirts. How could I know any of those things would happen?
I used to think that I could see into the future a little, or at least anticipate its forks well enough to navigate them. I got into the best colleges, married the right girl, worked at the right companies, threaded the narrow window to enter and exit the startup lottery just as it peaked. Controlling my future felt hard but possible. These days I feel like Herbert's lost messiah: His mind cowered, overwhelmed by infinite possibilities. His lost vision became like the wind, blowing where it willed.
But it could be a gift, I think. It's a hard way to live, grasping everything so tightly. What could I be without that fear? What could she?
loved this :) i have similar tendencies toward control, and a 4yo daughter. i'm finding parenting in general is just one long practice of letting go, little by little - and i hate it!
as a daughter of a father but also as a person, i feel so lucky to have stumbled across your writing. came from the math team article and am now going to pore. thank you for writing, your clarity gives me hope as a young neurotic.