By David Himmel

Parenthood requires sacrifice. Lots of it. A more optimistic person might say it’s not sacrifice but compromise, and to that I say they don’t know what they’re talking about. Over the last several years, my wife and I have been parents to a wonderful little human named Harrison. He’s intelligent, strong, funny, helpful, and kind. Most of the time anyway. He’s also a three-year-old toddler so he is also erratic, neurotic, sullen, mercurial, and violent. Why, just yesterday, he slapped me across the face after telling him I loved him. In a very tiny nutshell, that right there is parenthood. You give love, you get smacked in the face.

Parenthood also comes with judgement. Judgement from friends, family members, other parents, kids, and your own. There’s a constant vice grip of pressure to not screw up—not do anything that will come back to twist the truth or skew the perception in a tell-all book or on a fancy, blogsite hosted by Squarespace.

Being a parent is living in constant fear or failure, retaliation, and getting slapped in the face, kicked in the nuggets, and broken at the heart. And that is why my wife and I decided to give our son away. This Easter, Harrison will go to live with and be raised by his grandparents in the small rural town of Hammond, Illinois.

No doubt we’ll be judged for this decision. Brutally judged. Cast out of our circle of friends because, after all, what kind of monsters just, like, give their kid away. Perhaps you’re judging us now as you read this confession/explanation. But as you build your disdain and formalize your level of offense from our decision, you must know that we did not come to this decision easily. We agonized over it for days after a string of very difficult bedtime sessions.

He just refused, well, everything. Refused to brush his teeth. Refused to put on pajamas. Refused to sit and read the three books he picked out. Refused to stay under the covers. It has been exhausting. My wife and I have both seen what too many years of parenting has done to too many people. It breaks them. It robs them of their individuality, assaults their sex drive, slaughters their ability to make rational decisions, strips them of the vibrancy and curiosity that occupied them before they were parents. Parenthood removes the will to live a life—an actual life. Parenthood leads to buying items with sayings about coffee to decorate your house. Parenthood breaks your brain into thinking “Live, Laugh, Love” is a clever and inspiring mantra.

My brain is so burned out, I haven’t managed to read a single book since becoming a father. That’s more than three years now. I haven’t been able to watch a movie or enjoy a new TV series. All I have capacity for is watching Friends and Marvel films up to Infinity War. New things require energy and capacity I just don’t have.

But it’s not like we drowned the kid or left him to bake in a hot car or let him fall out of a window. We’re not monsters. We’re humans who want to live a good life. And we want our son, whom we still love, to live a good life. And he will do just that in Hammond, Illinois.

He’ll be loved. He’ll be with his grandparents, closer to his aunts and uncles and cousins. There’s a family park a stone’s throw from the house he’ll grow up in that he already loves. There’s a pool there. He loves swimming. He’s so brave and strong, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he becomes an Olympic swimmer like Michael Phelps. I may never know because my wife and I will likely be drunk and stoned making art in Paris or sleeping off a lazy afternoon on a Caribbean shore or murdering a cop in Portland, Oregon. Who knows where we’ll be because without the responsibility of parenthood, the world is once again our oyster. And we plan on devouring the whole goddamn thing. 

Harrison will have fields to play in. Outside of a big city, he’ll grow up surrounded by nature, or, rather, fields of soy and corn that’ll be used to make the foods that are slowly killing us. He’ll belong to a good church. And with his half-Jew blood, he’ll be respected because he’s a Jew like Jesus. He’ll grow up appreciating bro country—something I continue to do but never succeed. And I blame my northern Illinois living for that.

We will still see Harrison. At holidays, just like we already see my in-laws at holidays. And it’s not like we’re sending him to live with old-ass grandparents. These grandparents are not much older than I am. They’re younger than Don Hall even.

Will we miss Harrison? At first. But then the drugs and booze will kick in and we’ll be fine. And we’ll finally get to watch Euphoria with that young woman from the Spider-Man movie. We might even read Infinite Jest!

We’re giving our son away because we love him. But we also love ourselves. This is a win-win for everyone. This is the best thing for Harrison. His life will be full and free, not empty and confined like it would be living in the city with two withering creatives. Oh, sure, we could take him to a museum, but what kind of idiot takes children to museums? Parents, that’s who. With Harrison gone, we no longer have to be idiots. And he no longer has to be a witness to our withering demise as intelligent human beings.

We, on the other hand, will get to see Harrison grow up and thrive. But from a distance. That’s why we gave our son away.