The New Yorker: Q&A: Civic Emotions
"The gate we walk through when we become parents is, in my experience, the most one-sided gate we walk through in life. One morning, you are a ship out on the ocean, heading for Byzantium; the next, you and your spouse have become a harbor for another boat getting ready for its own voyage out. And, though you sneak away for weeks on book tours, you are never anything but a harbor again. (An abandoned harbor, eventually, searching the horizon for the long-gone ships.)

This is a good thing, of course, but becoming a parent made me, I think, more impatient with writing anything that seemed to me homework—work made to order, and not about the things that truly obsess one but about the things about which one is expected to have a professional opinion. I recall standing at the entrance of a Bruce Nauman exhibition, shortly after my son was born—and Nauman is an artist I keenly admire and have analyzed at exhausting length—where one of his “Clown Torture” videos was shouting at people, and thinking, I am interested in this, but I do not care about this as obsessively as I do about watching my child grow into consciousness. Life is too short, and parenting too exhausting, to allow you much time for mere professional opinionating.

And then, for all the joys that parenting provides, it also makes you keenly aware of the temporariness of all experience. To a child, family life looks as fixed and solid as a civilization, with rituals and routines and prohibitions—boxes of ornaments that have always been in the basement and silverware that has always been resting in the drawer. In fact, to the parents, it’s a frantic improvisation, as fragile and contingent as a truce in wartime. We see the bills and they see—and should only see—the ongoing surface of reassuring sameness.

More than the continuity of time, what parenting provides, I think, is a sense of the fragility of existence. Darwin grasped this after the tragic death of his daughter, who was only ten, and there is, as I’ve tried to show recently in the magazine, illuminating his work a half-stoical, half-heartbroken sense of the irreconcilable demands of deep time, where rocks are made and animals evolve, and quick time, human time, where our children are born and can depart. You can’t reconcile one time with the other; you just have to live in the knowledge of both. This fracture of vision is part of what being a parent is about."

Adam Gopnik nails the experience of parenthood.