A year ago today…

A year ago today, Renae came running back into the bedroom at 4:30am to announce that she was pregnant, and it’s been downhill ever since. Just look at what I have to deal with every single day.

Sarcasm probably isn’t the best thing to use for something like this, but I just want to highlight the huge dichotomy that lies within raising a child.

From a certain standpoint, having a kid is a pretty bad decision. You and your wife have a comfortable, easy life. You’re both working full-time, so you can buy anything you want whenever you want. You can go anywhere with relative ease—suddenly packing up the car and heading out of town for the weekend is no big deal. The house looks presentable the majority of the time. And perhaps most importantly, you’re almost never tired, and when you are, it’s because you slept in too late on a Saturday morning.

Having a child screws all of that up royally, and then some—and anyone who says differently is either not a parent or a parent in serious denial. Not to restate all of the clichés, but everything in your life gets turned upside down, smashed to little bits, and left by the side of the road as a heap of burning wreckage.

You’d think something like that would leave a person feeling at least somewhat resentful, especially someone as brood-prone as me. But then those eyes look right at you, and as broken, exhausting, and frustrating as everything is, you feel contentment quite like you’ve never felt before.