Date: 2013-05-26
This post is also at Medium.
Our baby boy was born a few days ago. We’re very happy. Friends came to the hospital, the computer was full of congratulations and then, the first night with our brand new baby came.
I stayed with my wife at the hospital and I had forgotten the first nights and what the lack of sleep does to your head, and especially to your wive’s head. Although, to be fair, my son is very regular and wakes up around two specific times during the night. And suddenly, the question popped up in my head:
Why do we do this? Why do we have babies?
Don’t get me wrong, I love my 5-year-old daughter and I love that little fellow looking at me from his crib (probably thinking that I’m just a huge breast), is just that we know what we are running into, but we do it anyway. And when it comes to look for reasons to aswer the questions above, we usually try many: “I love kids”, “I want to leave a trace on earth”, “It is our purpose in life”, etc. But here I think that Bill Cosby’s answer in his book “Fatherhood” is the best: Having babies is a totally irrational decision.
I guess once we start to get used to my son’s overnight feeding schedule and we leave that a bit suicidal sleep-deprived state of the first days, I’ll pick up my son and think with a smile: “Why do we keep on having babies?”