The New Parent Story I Wasn’t Told

How my first month as a father is shattering convention and revealing magic.

No matter how many stories I heard about parenthood, I couldn’t picture what lay beyond my daughter Ember’s birth. It was as if I stood on the edge of a map of the known world, with “here be dragons” marking the unknown.

Even right up to the morning my wife’s water broke, I felt like I was staring at an event horizon I couldn’t see past. As I drove us toward a hospital we’d never visited to see a legendary doctor we’d never met who could possibly deliver a vaginal breech birth for us, I was driving us into a veil of mystery.

And I just had no felt sense of what being a father would actually be like.

Today, one month later, as I held the warm weight of her tiny body against my chest, swaying and humming a made-up lullaby at 3am, I realized something: This is nothing like what I could have imagined. Nothing like the stories I was told about parenthood.

Parents kept telling me that it would be hard.

And it’s not that things haven’t been hard.

I had a couple moments where I felt so low on sleep that I felt delirious. I could feel my consciousness go into dark places that it’s touched on in plant medicine journeys. I’d see images of me dropping the baby, and it certainly wasn’t a healthy place to be caring for a newborn infant from.

Kiki Candace Sauve

and I had three rough days where we really struggled relationally to stay in connection amidst the tension. We were each doing our best, and yet our best kept leading to snappiness and collapse.

It wasn’t until I willingly chose to sob through my defeat and she chose to feel her helplessness, while we laid collapsed next to each other in bed, that things turned a corner. Once we stopped resisting our own emotional experiences, we came back into connection with ourselves and each other.

But when I zoom out to the big picture, the hard moments seem more like blips in the overall terrain of the month. What’s emerged in place of those challenges seems so different than the narrative that I’ve been shared and that I walked toward fatherhood with.

Perhaps we’re pioneering a new way to be parents — or perhaps we’re rediscovering how humans were meant to raise children all along.

The other day, as I woke up at 10am, perhaps only fifteen minutes to spare before I was supposed to serve tea to a dear friend visiting our house, and I had to make Kiki breakfast, feed the dog, then immediately clean up a trail of vomit and poop she’d left behind — I actually smiled. Amidst the swirl of activity, I was enjoying myself.

And so I want to share the beautiful ways that our experience of parenthood has been so different than what I’ve heard described — with the hope of painting a different reality of what parenthood could feel like.

I feel more connected to my friends and community than I’ve ever felt.

The predominant narrative that I’ve heard from new parents — and a fear that I’d held for a long time — is a story that new parents end up feeling isolated. They end up feeling distanced from their friends (particularly their non-parent friends), and they might even feel a sense of them against the world.

One friend thought that we would disappear from his life for a year. We even thought to ourselves that we’d want to keep house guests to a minimum, at least in the early weeks.

What I’ve experienced has turned out to be quite the opposite. I’m experiencing friends deepening their investments in our family and our home in a way that I couldn’t have known to wish for. Our friends have really shown up, coming to our home to bring us food, cook for us, babysit, give massages and acupuncture, provide emotional support, and even tidy the house.

We’ve invited our loved ones into our home and our intimate lives. We let our closest friends know to treat our home with an open door — no need to even knock, just to let themselves in. We created and shared a signup sheet for meals and for support around the home.

We’ve let ourselves ask for support and are receiving it in levels more abundant than I ever knew possible. I had to let my heart break multiple times in tears just to let all the love in. It’s as if our daughter became an external manifestation of something deeply important to us and created a sacred container for which more love and support could be poured into our family.

Over the years, Kiki and I have cultivated such a deep level of authenticity with each other and with our friends, that we’ll openly cry, get angry, move through tension, or ask for support with them around. I’ve gone to our emotional release room (aka our basement) to scream out my overwhelm or frustration while our friends are at our house or asked friends to witness my three-year-old self throwing a tantrum. We’re being ourselves and not wasting energy putting on masks, which means we’re able to get the nourishment we need from everyone who visits.

I only had a vague, intellectual sense of what it meant to “raise children in community” before. And now, I’m getting my first felt sense and taste of what it could feel like — the magic that happens when we let ourselves be held by our tribe. It’s created a deeper level of belonging and abundance than I ever knew was available.

I feel more love and attraction for my wife than ever before.

I’d been warned prior to birth that I’d probably feel lonely and a sense of losing attention from my wife. One person had even suggested that I might need to find other sexual partners to make up for the lost intimacy.

But actually, I’m feeling my love and attraction to her only grow since pregnancy and post-birth. I feel so much devotion and reverence to the woman who’s the mother of my child. And given that my sister had even described her experience of our love prior as being “bombastic,” to grow that love even more feels like quite the accomplishment.

“I love being on the parenting journey with you,” we keep saying to each other. We’re making time for eye-gazing and canoodling with Ember on our chests. We’re flirting with each other almost daily, as I await the day we’re able to make love again. The free and increased flow of desire between us feels like its own magic, as our love and felt sense of divine union deepens even further in this chapter.

I’m fully including myself and feel so included in this parenting journey — as we’ve found ways to balance baby responsibilities. She handles “food in,” and I handle “food out” (e.g. diaper changes). I’m generally responsible for putting our baby to sleep at night and for the midnight shift to feed with the bottle.

My coach Mina helped me see that I’m leading as the nervous system of the family. And as I expand my awareness to include the house that I’d bought for us, I feel myself as the container where all this magic and love is happening.

I feel more connected with my mom than ever before.

My mom’s visiting for two weeks to help support with the baby and spend time with her granddaughter. Up to the day before her arrival, I’d been feeling some trepidation around her visit. It’d be the first time she’d be immersed in my day-to-day living since I became an adult. And given how disconnected I’d feel whenever she’d express love as worry or give advice about how I should or shouldn’t be living, I felt concern around what living with her for two weeks would be like.

I knew I’d have to have a heart-to-heart with her, and even practiced my conversation with Mina the day before my mom arrived. By the time of our conversation, I reached a place of open-heartedness. I realized that the person I was fighting to have my boundaries honored was just a projection of my mom in my head — and that the woman flying out to support us wanted to be on our team.

On the drive back from picking her up from the airport, I held her hand as I just shared that Kiki and I live our lives differently than she’s probably used to. We feel our emotions, for instance, letting ourselves cry or get angry and don’t tell each other to stop crying or to not be angry. We even extend the same invitation to friends when they’re at our house.

The conversation didn’t have the harshness or rigidity I’d expected of setting a boundary — it felt more like inhabiting the role of the man of the house and warmly sharing the house rules. This was just how we did things around here.

I held her hand again as I let her know that I wanted to feel supported and trusted by her in my life choices, and that when she tells me things I should or shouldn’t be doing — that I don’t feel that way and end up pulling away.

And I spoke this mostly in Chinese, which in the past has been a struggle for me to make myself felt fully expressed and heard.

The experience of her being at the house has been unbelievably easeful. And I’m super grateful to have someone loving on us by cooking us meals every day and taking care of our little one.

I’m experiencing a newfound simplicity to life.

The first few days were filled with some higher-paced franticness, for sure. It was a scramble as we figured out in real-time how to keep our little human alive while getting the rest we needed.

But after a few high-leverage tweaks, we started to get the hang of it. (For any new parents, 1/ buy a second-hand Snoo, 2/ build a relationship with a lactation consultant who you can text with questions about breastfeeding, 3/ find a direct-care pediatrician who’s able to visit your house and contact directly, and 4/ start a meal train. Each one was game-changing).

Within a week or so, we had sufficient ad-hoc systems, routines, and support in place so that we were no longer treading water. And within two weeks, we could simplify down to what we actually needed.

With both Kiki and I choosing to take a break from work to focus on parenthood, life with the baby right now is actually fairly simple. The baby’s needs are fundamentally just feed, sleep, fresh diapers, and skin-to-skin contact. In this simplicity, I’m finding a new level of presence with life.

The days and nights feel long, and yet the month has felt full and gone by surprisingly quickly. I’m cherishing all the quality time our family’s getting together.

I’ve died into new levels of grounded freedom.

I’d been forewarned that I would experience death and loss, from parts of independent life that would no longer be, from things that I could no longer do.

While it’s true that I’ve been spending the vast majority of the past month at home, I’ve also been surprised at how soon I’ve been able to restore some sense of normalcy. Within the first week, I’d carved out daily time for my morning tea practice. And within the first two, I was already returning to my men’s group, weekly ecstatic dance, and the social gatherings I cared about. I’m deeply appreciative of my wife for being aligned in supporting the self-care that I need to fully show up as a father.

It’s also true that I’ve experienced death. I just didn’t expect the freedom that I’d feel on the other side.

For many days after our daughter’s birth, I’d get up in the morning, feeling my system speed up through the slew of things that needed to be done — so that I could finally sit down for my morning tea practice and find the ground that I was yearning for.

Years of meditation and plant medicine have really ingrained in my body that the relief I get from following impulses that are anxiety-driven is ultimately short-lived. I was externalizing safety and grounded-ness in tea, rather than feeling the safety and ground that is inherent in myself.

True freedom would come from the death that follows feeling through the anxiety. And the first month of parenthood has provided a spiritual container filled with the spacious simplicity to notice and catch my patterns — a kind of everyday alchemy that transforms challenge into healing magic.

Multiple times, I chose to willingly be with the anxiety, to let old self die into it, rather than to follow the impulse. I can feel each death clearing any antsiness in my system to get something done — knowing that it will just purify me so that what I ultimately choose to do in life comes powerfully from pure desire rather than from avoidance of some emotional experience.

As I hold Ember in my arms this morning, watching her chest rise and fall with each tiny breath, I reflect on how the stories I’d been told about new parenthood weren't wrong — they were just incomplete.

They focused on what would be lost, on the challenges to overcome. But they missed how parenthood breaks you open to receive more love, grounds you in what truly matters, and teaches you that true freedom comes not from controlling life, but from dancing with it.

One month in, I’m beginning to understand that this is the real magic of parenthood: it’s not just about raising a child, but about allowing yourself to be raised by the experience.