It's Kind of Like Falling in Love

I've been searching for an apt description of the emotion of having a baby. The best analogy I've come up with, and have been mulling for the past few weeks, is that having a baby is most similar to the sensation of your first or second experience falling in love -- not the kind of cautioned, jaded love people can have later in their adult lives, but the powerful, inexperienced connection of falling in love with someone earlier in your life. It's most close to that kind of strong emotion, minus the sometimes off-the-rails component of being in love as a teenager; parenthood is a far more stable and permanent feeling than that. This is the best way I can describe it to someone without kids.

Think way back to one of those experiences when you were a teenager or in your early twenties. Remember how when you went outside on a cloudy day, all you could see was the blue sky and all you could hear were the birds singing? When you fell in love, even if you were in a job you disliked, it seemed just fine and the least of your concerns. Your entire mood was lifted and your worldview was improved in every regard.

To sum up my experience so far, all the bad things people warned me about are far less bad, and all the good things people told me about are 100 times better.

Babyhood doesn't know the world of adults. There's no cynicism, violence, conflict, or all the little crap people just accept by being an adult (think of the disgusting adult phenomenon of passive aggression. There's no passive aggressiveness with babies!). Being a newborn is a simple world and a baby is as close to a pure human you'll ever meet. That's the world you enter when you have a baby.