The New Year's toddler
My son was born on New Year's Day, which means every year literally starts with him. Notes on living with a toddler.
My son was born on the first of January. This has two consequences. The first is administrative: his birthday will forever compete with the collective hangover of the entire planet, and one day he is going to do the maths on why his parties are so poorly attended and I am not looking forward to that conversation. The second is accidental poetry that I refuse to apologise for enjoying: every year of my life now literally begins with him. The calendar did that, not me. I just get to notice it.
He's a toddler now, and I want to write honestly about this age, because the public record on small children is badly corrupted. It's been written mostly by two factions: the greeting-card faction, for whom every moment is a blessing, and the burnt-out-irony faction, for whom children are tiny drunk tyrants and parenting is a war blog. Both are lying by omission. The truth about living with a toddler is that both channels broadcast at once, all day, and the experience of parenting is the experience of listening to them simultaneously.
Here is what a toddler actually is, as far as I can tell. It's a person being assembled in real time, in front of you, out of whatever materials happen to be lying around, and the materials are mostly you. Your phrases come back with the emphasis in strange new places. Your gestures reappear, miniaturised, deployed with devastating timing. There is no audit trail. Something you said once, in passing, six weeks ago, resurfaces verbatim at dinner in front of guests, because the archive is total and the retrieval policy is chaos. Living with him is living with a small, unlicensed biographer.
And the negotiation. Nobody warns you that this is the litigation age. He has exactly one legal strategy, which is repetition, and I want to tell you it doesn't work, but I've been worn down by opposing counsel who bills in decibels and has no other appointments. He argues cases with total conviction and zero precedent. The verdicts he seeks are things like "more" and "again" and "no bath, actually". He loses most of them and appeals every single one. I have, more than once, found myself constructing an actual reasoned position on a matter of pure nonsense, out loud, at 6:40 in the morning, and heard myself doing it, and thought: this is my life now, and also, damn it, he's getting better at this.
The part that took me by surprise, and I should have seen it coming given what I do all day, is what he's done to my attention. My head does not idle; it never has. There's a background process that runs through everything, and very little in this world switches it off. He does. Not because parenting is relaxing, God, no, but because a toddler detects divided attention the way sharks detect blood, instantly and at distance, and escalates until the attention is undivided. You cannot be half-present with him. He simply won't transact on those terms. Which means, several times a day, I'm dragged fully into a single moment, on the floor, doing something with no productive value whatsoever, and it's the closest thing to meditation my brain accepts. He is, hour to hour, the most demanding thing in my life. He's also the only thing that reliably shuts the noise off. Nobody tells you those come in the same package.
There's a professional irony here I may as well own. I've spent years fascinated by how intelligence emerges, how a system bootstraps from noise into a mind, and it turns out the best seat in the house was in my own hallway. Watching language arrive is astonishing: first as sound, then as tool, then, suddenly, as play, the moment they discover a sentence can be bent for comedy. He is genuinely funny, and I don't mean cute-funny; I mean he has timing, he understands that a pause makes it land, and nobody taught him that. It grew. I spend my working week around impressive systems and none of them has made me laugh the way he does, deliberately, by choosing the exact wrong word at the exact right moment.
I'll be honest about the ledger, because sanitised parenting content is a lie with soft lighting. There are hours that are terrible, days that run entirely on repetition and negotiation and the physical management of a person who has decided, on principle, against pants. The love is not the same thing as enjoying every minute, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something, probably a course. But the accounting only balances one way: most of what's genuinely good in my week runs through him, and it isn't close. His grandmother, my mother, understood this before I did; she took one look at him and reorganised her heart around it, and watching the two of them together is one of the quiet great pleasures currently on offer in my life.
One more thing, and it's a promise as much as a paragraph. He'll be able to read one day, and eventually he'll find this, because kids find everything. So: mate, this page is yours. If any of it ever embarrasses you, tell me and it comes down, no negotiation required, which will be a novel experience for both of us. Until then, the record stands: you arrived on the first day of the year, and every year since has started with you. Administratively and otherwise.
Prefer the full experience? Read this essay in the house. Machine-readable: markdown source.