Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This week, I discuss the recent cultural shift in which celebrities are beginning to rethink how they view parenthood.
I Want To Be Like Her When I Grow Up
I don’t typically take celebrity comments to heart because, for the most part, they are a coalition of vain and vapid people who aren’t good for society, outside of sometimes giving us memorable performances. Most of their opinions on societal or political issues negatively affect our culture. Still, there seems to be a change among some of them concerning parenting that I think deserves a little recognition.
I was watching a clip from an interview with “Harry Potter” star Daniel Radcliffe. He was promoting his latest movie when ETalk host Sangita Patel tried to get him to admit that having a newborn or becoming a parent during filming was a terrible experience that left him permanently exhausted.
But Daniel respectfully refused to play into that narrative. Instead, he said, “You’re always kind of tired as a new parent, but you know, the good stuff is so good. The bad stuff about parenting is, like, you’re tired and stressed, and it’s all very easy to describe. And the good stuff about parenting is so wonderful that it’s, like, impossible to describe, which is why you hear about the bad stuff more than the good stuff.”
I wish more parents would talk about the beauty of having children. It’s funny to joke about the exhaustion and diaper blowouts, but little is told about the quiet moments when your newborn baby has just been fed and is curled up into a little ball on your chest. Their eyes are struggling to stay open as y’all’s breathing rhythms become in sync.
Or when they start to become more aware of your surroundings, and they truly see you for the first time. Their eyes lock on, and the widest smile forms on their face.
It’s these moments, the ones that are so hard to capture or explain without personal experience, that are left out of our conversations. Almost as if saying them doesn’t have any meaning at all until you’ve felt it yourself.
If you haven’t listened to the new Kelsea Ballerini song, “I Sit In Parks,” it’s time. It’s the tragic tale of how she’s wasted her youth chasing fame and album sales rather than seeking a husband and having children.
Read the lyrics carefully: