[...] One reason you end up becoming deeply invested in your child’s potential is that parenting forces you to recognize your own limitations as a human being.

“Then just play the song, and I won’t be mean.” I knew I was in the wrong now, but I couldn’t bring myself back into the right. I had too much momentum.

“I don’t wanna play the song.”

“JUST PLAY IT!” I saw Julian’s face crumple first, his chin wrinkle, before I heard how my voice sounded: growly, dark and aggressive, like a comic-book villain’s.

And then Julian played, crying the entire time, carefully finding all the right notes. It’s hard to describe how it feels to make your own kid cry, how everything inside goes a little haywire. At that point, I should have hugged and reassured him, but I was still shaking with rage—not directed at him anymore, but it didn’t matter. It had become clear to me that I was a shitty dad and couldn’t pretend to be a good dad even if Julian needed me to.

“Good,” I said, rising from my seat. “You’re done. You can go play with your toys.”

Julian was still crying as I walked away. I climbed into my unmade bed thinking to myself: I hate this. I hate being a parent. I hate everything about it. I could hear Julian sniffling. He played with his truck for a few seconds. Then he came into the bedroom. It was too soon. I needed an hour, or maybe a year, to recover. He climbed on top of me. I just wanted to lie under the blanket and feel like shit indefinitely. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t get away from him.

“Why? Why? Why?” your child asks, and you don’t know the answer. Your task as a parent is to keep human life going a little longer, but sometimes you find yourself wondering, what’s so great about human life? Why do we need more of it? Raising kids makes this feeling more acute. Not just because you’re at the point where most of the exciting things you once imagined the future had in store for you—oh, the places you’ll go, etc.—are either in the past or never happened at all. But also because as a parent you are thrown daily into a state of mere being, of existing for hours at a time devoid of any goals other than passing the time. Look at the vacant expression of a typical parent at a playground following their kids up and down the ramps and ladders of the jungle gym. This is life absent a higher purpose or plot, aimed only at perpetuating itself. You could say parents are like Sisyphus, except their role is less heroic. Replace his mountain with a mini-slide, his rock with a rubber ball, and the parent is the one who has to stand nearby and make sure he doesn’t break his neck so he can keep bringing the ball back to the top of the slide and watching it roll down over and over again.