In my early twenties my parents had a fight. A bad one. I later found out that they had been fighting for a while and, they were on the verge of divorce. I always believed that they had a great marriage. Months later for some other reason I moved in with them; witnessing the prolonged fight before my eyes while living in the air tainted by their feud deeply traumatized me. “I’m an adult and this toxicity breaks my mental.” I thought, “What if I was a teen?” Strangely I was almost appreciating the situation, that it happened in my adulthood instead of adolescence. That they hid it until then. That could have destroyed my character development. And it did, in hindsight, leave a scar on me.

I never liked kids. I became aware of my disdain against those naive, annoying brats since I was in 8th grade when I saw 7th grade younglings running, cluelessly, I presume, in school corridors. I didn't want to be with other kids in the same room, let alone talking to them, which is a waste of time and energy. I guess that's because I have very few relatives younger than me whom I have met for about three times in total in my whole life. I'm used to being surrounded by adults or sisters more capable than me, who explain things I don't understand to me, not vice versa. I always try to be as kind as possible to all kids, however, because I believe they deserve it–being naive is kind of their responsibility–and I don't want people to find my preference toward them. You can imagine my then opinion about having children.

The trauma elevated this stance to a whole new level. Behind the fight was a man, with reasons that I can resonate with, prioritizing himself over family. Me, a slightly spoiled young man just finished studies then, knew and was allowed for only one thing in my whole life: prioritizing my interest over everything. I guess my mother was right; she always said that I'm my father's son. When I curled on my bed in night, seeking a moment of tranquility, I saw myself exhibiting the same behavior, prioritizing myself over family, therefore repeating the same mistake to my future family, who deserves my whole attention. I always believed parents are responsible for giving family their full attention; if one can't do that, one shouldn't start a family. I saw myself fail to achieve that. Feeling desperate for the conclusion, I firmly believed that the only way to escape this doomed future, to protect my future wife and children that I didn't know who they are, if they even exist, is to not marry and not have children.

As I landed on my then dream job, moving out and living my best life after, those beliefs faded as years passed. Three years later I met my wife, three more years after we were married, and five years of contemplation after that, we welcomed our baby girl. The deciding factor was her nephew. He is cute, kind, extremely well-behaved but at the same time just naive enough to remind me he's still a boy, all that made me realize maybe for the first time of my entire life that, not all kids are brats. They can be, very rarely, by proper guidance, education and being in the right environment, little angels as well. It was at that moment did I see a very blurry picture of what people have been preaching about "the happiness of having kids".

I wish I could say that she fills my everyday with happiness; that I’m enjoying every second of the fatherhood, but then I would be lying. In 2025 a Japanese mother killed her four months old baby. Hours before, allegedly, she called the child guidance office saying that she “wasn’t confident in parenting” then ended the call because “the baby was crying”. She claimed that she was suffering from severe postpartum depression. Such tragedies may emerge on news–hopefully not too frequently–occasionally, and people talk about it, maybe even send prayers and love, before changing the channel. Without experiencing it by oneself it’s hard to imagine the mental status under the consistent pressure of one carelessness and the baby dies. Even without the death risk, imagine when she wakes up 20 minutes after freaking finally falling asleep, four in the morning, after an hour of soothing and cuddling, two weeks in a row. I had to constantly remind myself that homo sapiens is probably engineered in gene level to sense high stress when hearing infant crying in order to urge action, therefore I having negative thoughts while soothing her is only natural. The “all was paid off by this” moment never came; my only drive is a sense of duty like a patriotic conscript. I can, maybe not appropriate, but justify when I have these kinds of thoughts as I don't love kids, but postpartum depression can be brutal even for people who genuinely do and want them. Some parents, despite loving their children with full heart, fail to find their baby cute, even sense resentment against their crying baby. I'm glad I haven't experienced that.

I always, absolutely unbiased, find her extremely cute. Her mother, grandparents and even her pediatrician say the same. This is just an universal fact: She is the cutest baby in the world. Even when crying she is cute. I was never a “Oh look at this beautiful baby” type of person–still not am–but I’ll admit that there is beauty in them. I never liked animal as well. People, especially on the internet, freak out at the first cat pic they see. I never understand that–the freaking out, not the cuteness. The other day, after she was born, on my way to the hospital after work, I met the old lady living two floors above with a Japanese Chin (maybe, I don’t know, I’m not a dog person). I petted him. I had never petted a dog in my life. A bit more love in the world wouldn’t hurt, I thought (And before you ask, no, I still don't freak out about cat pics.)

Sometimes she is at the receiving end of that love. Often on the street a stranger (mostly an old lady) would smile and say "She's so cute". The amount of increased encounters and conversations because of her, with strangers or acquaintances, is mind-blowing. It feels like there is a secret society hidden in plain sight, its members greet each other with nods and smiles, and their codename is "parent". In 2024 my wife and I visited my colleague Jo and his wife Nat, who were expecting. We had so much great time that when we were leaving I was secretly mourning: "Such fun time won't be there anymore, we are having different life paths." We then had two meetups, both were as fun, both with conversations surrounding our kids. Our another dear friends, Tim and Rae, whose flat was a three minutes walk from ours, moved to Australia four years ago (we are still salty about it). Our chats surged after both welcomed babies. Likewise for chats with my in-laws and parents (they have been good for a decade). When they came to visit us my mother held her granddaughter in her arms, consistently with smile on her face, until they left.

Everybody at least once dreams about being the best parent they can imagine; my approach toward that imagination includes a lot of reading and researching. Parenting, which I knew nothing about, nevertheless I reckon, is a domain which requires knowledge from many different or even unrelated fields, and I aim to have a grasp on all of them. Behind every behavior are mechanisms that can be learned, all I have to do is to know them all. There is, obviously, no dev environment to test on, so she is where I apply those practices. When one hypothesis does not lead to expected results, I change minimum variables and try again. The process includes, sometimes, a lot of crying, especially when it's sleep-related, but I'm pretty immune to it, which I find a helpful trait. As I see it, crying is nothing more than a baby's way to communicate. I stopped doing it this way though, after my wife told me that a baby is not an engineering problem and I should not treat her like one. Fair enough. She isn't deterministic anyway.

The realization of entering a new chapter of life did not come with gain of moments of happiness but loss of time to read, code or listen to music for leisure. Everyday I wake up, feed her, play with her until she starts crying, struggle to put her in sleep, she somehow sleeps, half an hour later she starts making cute sounds, rinse and repeat. It's groundhog day. I started to lose sense of time. My key to escape the durance of eternity is reading, writing and coding, as they give me a sense of progress. At first I watched YouTube whenever I had fractions of time to rest but transitioned to Advent of Code soon after I started to feel my brain rotting. Coding is great as I can think about algorithm or system design problems I encountered when I'm cuddling her. I picked up side projects again. I have an indefinite amount of things to think about regarding side projects, and as I'm having hours with both hands occupied everyday, all I can do is nothing but think. They helped me to stop thinking about when does this end.

About two months into paternity leave I started rewriting amp, a self-made markdown parser, in Rust. I know every line of the TypeScript codebase and thought the migration would be a good entry point for learning Rust. Since I tried Rust for the first time in early 2025 in a side project (which didn't become something) I have been writing everything in pure functional fashion whenever possible. A Rust experience in my your-average-codecamp-trained-frontend-dev portfolio would be a good accent, I thought, and more importantly, it's way, way more fun to think about ownership, pattern matching and functional programming than identifying the causes of her crying. If only she's pure functional too. That would really help maintaining her feed and sleep routines.

Before rewriting amp I released a minor patch on my game project, and after that I worked on this site's refactoring. It was easy to spot places needing improvements when I was thinking about them all the time, and shamefully, more than I was thinking about her. My escapes became my purposes. Making the matter worse, I was weirdly motivated; everyday an urge to create, research or write some different things emerged; my appetite of expression and knowledge wanted to break out of my body after being contained for weeks. My wife wasn't happy about that. For good reasons. The baby wasn't getting enough attention I should have gave her. My fear was proved right 15 years after: I did repeat the mistake. It disturbs me. I found myself torn between the fact that I failed to live up to my expectations, and the months-long roadmap I secretly planned in my mind. I had to make a decision: to be the me I was, or the me I aspire to be. And so I did. I killed the young man.

When the days of fatherhood started I instinctively looked for inspirations from all the familiar stories–which are mostly games–with a signature father figure. The first few candidates were all inappropriate. It's a little bummer that I can't yell "boy" at her, mostly because her mother is alive and well and I'm not bold and muscular, but even if I could, building essentially no bond with her until she’s about eleven years old is far from the father-child relationship I want. I would absolutely hold her while running from spore-infected zombies, but I refuse to even just thinking about how the story went because it's a bad omen. Lose her in a parallel universe while cutting her pinky off in the process is a bad omen too. Apparently they hate to write a happy ending for a father and a daughter. It's probably a blessing I have not, yet, encountered these sorrowful journeys alongside her, but I'm still mildly disappointed that my drastic transition of role has not unfolded opportunities to experience tales in a new perspective.

I then recalled Professor Sol Weintraub, Rachel in a swaddling blanket, and Abraham's choice. If I hoist her up, offering her to god to showcase my obedience and loyalty, she would, like she always does, look at me with her big black eyes, which hasn’t seen any of the evil deeds done by human beings. She might even smile at me. This notion suddenly immensely saddened me. It was at that moment had I for the first time truly understood Sol's answer: no parent should be forced to surrender their child, whether over god or some greater good crap. I recalled the kids in Sandy Hook, in Minab, in Kyiv. News with children casualty hits different now. I have yet experience the happiness of gain but already terrified by the grief of loss.

"I found this strange feeling, that I don't really feel strong emotion looking at her" I said, Jo and Nat in the opposite side seats, "but when she smiles, I found myself smiling too before my brain registered. Like it bypasses my emotion. I don't know, it's hard to describe it."

Nat answered.

"That's love."