It is, I think, your first realization that you are no longer young: One of your friends—or simply someone you graduated with—becomes a parent. It happened for me soon after college, when I was 22 or 23 and a few relative acquaintances got married and had children within a year of throwing our caps and gowns into the spring air. I remember thinking, I didn’t even know people my age were allowed to have kids. It seemed like just the other day that I was walking past them on the way to ECON 410, or pretending to study at the table next to them in the library. We were so young.
Part of the reason for this way of thinking was the fact that I was nowhere close to becoming a father. My longest relationship up to that point in my life had lasted a couple of months, I was confused about what I wanted to pursue as a career, and I was living more than 2,000 miles away from most of my friends and family. I was making frozen meals from Trader Joe’s (which, to be clear, are objectively delicious) in the garage kitchen of a subletted house most nights for dinner. I also looked like I was 17 and was probably immature. No, I was not ready to become a dad.
But perhaps an even bigger reason for my surprise was the fact that it was increasingly and strikingly rare, among my oft-discussed/criticized Millennial generation, for a 22- or 23-year-old to have a baby. We are, of course, a selfish generation that delays parenthood (or doesn’t have kids at all!), which, of course, is leading to the inexorable decline of America. I looked at these new young parents with some mixture of curiosity and pity: Why did they want to sacrifice their 20s to the whims of a child? They couldn’t be that great, could they? This thinking was a product of a pretty significant societal shift: If I were the same age without kids living decades earlier, I would have been the one viewed as the outcast. Not having a child in your early 20s, for much of the 20th century, was uncommon and maybe even frowned upon.
I’m a dad now. My wife, Carly, and I have an 18-month-old daughter named Mayla, with another on the way: Carly is 21 weeks pregnant. I will have two children before I turn 30—something, had you told me seven years ago, about which I would have laughed out loud because it seemed so farfetched. Life, as the saying goes, comes at you fast.
But, despite the joys of fatherhood and my deep love for Mayla and her soon-to-arrive little brother or sister, that same thinking that I had when I was 22 still sometimes creeps in: Are other people my age thinking about me, about us, the same way I did about them? We’re older now, yes, but not by that much. We are still not the norm.
Am I growing up too fast?
Last week, after a particularly long day at work, I went on a run on the trail closest to my school. I’d run this trail, a winding, well-groomed section of the Mountains to Sea, dozens of times since we moved to Asheville four years ago, but on this run my mind wandered back to those early days when it was just me and Carly, living in a two-bedroom apartment close to downtown as we attempted to navigate our mid-20s. Life, I thought as I snaked through the leaves on that recent run, seemed so simple then: working and running and walking the dog before dinner. Our biggest decision—and I recognize that rose-colored glasses are indeed real—was often what new restaurant we should try on Friday night.
The leaves fell around me, painting the trail in browns and yellows and reds as I thought back to those times with an undeniable nostalgia and maybe even a bit of jealousy. Everything now, with a child, especially during the week, seems so frantic, so rushed that those days without the responsibilities of parenthood seem (justifiably or not) like an oasis of freedom.
Part of it, probably, is true. There is no denying that life with a child is vastly different from life without one. Becoming a parent is simply a sudden recognition that you are now responsible to sustain and nurture more than one human. For the first however many years of your life, your primary responsibility was to make sure you ate, slept, put on pants, etc.; as a dad, as a mom, as any type of caregiver, those responsibilities multiply.
That doesn’t take into account the fact that your child, especially a baby or toddler, becomes the center of your family’s solar system. They have to eat and sleep at certain times, and when they’re not doing either of those, they need to be entertained. This is, of course, incredibly rewarding—I still have not discovered any better use of my time than reading to Mayla as she sits, enthralled in a book she’s read dozens of times and smiling because she knows that the dragons are about to burn down the house because they unknowingly ate spicy salsa—but also, it’s fair to admit, incredibly exhausting. Apart from sitting your child in front of a screen, something we try extremely hard to never do (and, honestly, something that Mayla often doesn’t have the patience for anyway), there is little to no downtime when your toddler is awake.
The other part of my nostalgia, of the frequent questions about whether I’m growing up too fast, is perhaps more selfish. Your 20s are, the thinking goes, supposed to be the time you focus on yourself: figuring out your career, finding your new home, having fun with your friends. None of that is impossible with a child, but it’s different, accelerated. Sometimes I look at friends/acquaintances around my age, single and living in major cities, working 60-plus hours a week but meeting coworkers for happy hour and going out every weekend, taking cabs and ordering Uber Eats from the office—and it seems kind of fun, a thrill. (Again, the grass is always greener…) Did I miss that—am I missing that—because I became a dad at 27?
I finished the run and drove home to take Mayla to the park.
Maybe, as ever, there is more than one way of looking at it. Maybe, and not to get too philosophical here (though as a dad you start thinking deeper about most things), every person has a general path set for them, and small and big choices here or there determine its exact curves and undulations. Maybe life—maybe your 20s—is simply a series of mistakes and twists and waves, and it’s up to you to ride, learn from, enjoy them all, and trust that it’s ultimately going to work out the way it should.
I don’t regret becoming a dad at 27, or having two children before I turn 30. I wonder, of course, how my life would have been different had the timing or circumstances of a few small things been different—had I chosen a different major in college, had stuck it out in sports journalism, had I never moved back to Florida—but that’s forever secondary to the intense joy and gravity of being a dad.
When I came home the other day, Mayla’s face lit up as she exclaimed, “Dada!” She ran to me and wrapped my legs in a hug. And right then I knew that I had grown up at exactly the right time.
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