I'm a Blissful, Confessed Addict

And it's not to blogging, though that is my confessed addiction of choice.

According to this great Slate essay, I'm totally addicted to parenting!!
(thanks for the link, Laura! Gotta love your post's title Kiss Junkies!)

According to Shankar Vendantam "Parents Are Junkies" because "If parenting sucks, why do we love it?" There can be only one explanation: "we're addicted" and I couldn't agree more. One of the most important arguments used is that even after we have one child and we know how tough it is, we generally have more!

I am again going through a phase that I keep on saying over and over again that I want(ed) a baby. I know!! Wasn't I over that ages ago already? Shouldn't I be reading and re-reading my journals from Kelvin's infancy to help me realize my insanity? No, we aren't going to have more babies, K won't let me and thankfully my age is a huge deterrent, but... this explanation about addiction makes perfect sense to me right now.

Vendantam writes that lots of recent research has demonstrated that "becoming a parent does not make people happier; it makes them unhappier." However, "Research may depict parenthood as a bile-inducing, rage-fueling, stress-producing ordeal, but parents tell us that becoming parents is the best thing they ever did."  That's totally absolutely how I feel!! I have this overwhelming conviction that becoming a mother was the most amazing thing that ever happened to me.


Then, you look at photos of K and I before the boys came along -- we look so much younger! K's hair was nice and black -- now it is entirely salt & pepper in his temples. I like his looks, but there's no denying that we visibly and quickly aged after becoming parents. And yet, we love it. Not every minute (not even Every Other Minute as Andi Buchanan said in the title of her book Mother Shock), maybe we don't love it most minutes, but Vendantam is absolutely right in her evaluation here:

Parenting is a series of intensely high highs, followed by long periods of frustration and stress, during which you go to great lengths to find your way back to that sofa and that kiss. 

We have a name for people who pursue rare moments of bliss at the expense of their wallets and their social and professional relationships: addicts.

Children regularly give parents the kind of highs that only narcotics can rival. The unpredictability of those moments of bliss is an important factor in their addictiveness.

So, yeah... We're Kiss Junkies all right.  And I do my best to improve my odds of getting my fix every day or several times a day ("Like addicts, parents will sacrifice anything for the glimpses of heaven that their offspring periodically provide.").

Ah... that explains the life-long withdrawal symptoms that parents experience. My poor mom broken-hearted that I don't go back to live in Brazil.

Yeah... we parents are sad, hopeless specimens of humanity... I'm not looking forward to my lifelong quest towards a "recovery" that will never come. :(

I guess you can go cross out "blissful" from the title now. I'm officially grieving my dark future.