When you have a child, your previous life seems like someone else's. It's like living in a house and suddenly finding a room you didn't know was there, full of treasure and light.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
A lot of things you see as a child remain with you... you spend a lot of your life trying to recapture the experience.
The moment you have a child, in an instant your life is not for you, and your life is completely, 100 percent dedicated to another human being, and they will always come first. It changes you forever. It changes your perspective, and it gives you a nice purpose and focus.
Having children is exciting. Life puts the past into perspective.
Before you have children, you mostly think about the world in terms of yourself. And when you become a parent, the focus shifts to somebody else.
Having a child is sowing the seeds of your own obsolescence: birth is the fuse that leads to that other thing. You appear, you replace yourself, you die.
There's something really magical about having a child - it's like permission to begin again, start over, reevaluate some things, check yourself. Recognize yourself. And that's kind of what happened with me - I realized, in a few places, I was going down the wrong path.
Life changes when you have a child, when you have your own family. You become more careful about what you do. You're not going to be out late, going out to clubs, hanging out with your friends. You're going to be at home, taking care of your daughter, playing with her.
There's something really magical about having a child - it's like permission to begin again, start over, reevaluate some things, check yourself. Recognize yourself.
It's not a born-again thing; it was a peaceful, really, really cool moment where I just felt that I was no longer the dad anymore. I actually had become a son, and it makes things much easier from a day-to-day perspective.
When you discover that you are going to have a child, it stirs up memories of your own childhood.