Life is perpetual change, a series of transitions that push us into new identities or deepen existing ones. We leave home, have children, lose loved ones. We change jobs, relationships, and places of residence. These shifts mark ordinary movements in an individual’s life. But when you experience a major transition personally, it feels anything but ordinary. As Kathryn Schulz writes in her memoir Lost & Found, “Falling in love, getting married, having children, grieving, dying: how commonplace all of life’s grand transitions are in the abstract, how overwhelming when they happen to you.”
The weight of any grand transition is hard to grasp without living it. This is especially true when it comes to having children. With some life experiences, you can imagine your way toward what it might be like. Maybe you’ve never tasted an avocado milkshake, but if you’ve eaten avocados and you’ve eaten milkshakes, you can imagine how they’d taste together. “Certain ways of knowing are really accessible to us, even if they’re sort of new, because they’re based on ingredients that we already have at our disposal,” explains Dr. L.A. Paul, a philosopher and author of Transformative Experience. When it comes to parenting, however, no amount of preparation or imagination or even lived experience—nannying, holding your friend’s baby, working as a teacher—can fully prepare you for having your own child.
That’s because becoming a parent means entering “a new way of living,” says Paul.
Parents change their lives when a child arrives; they adjust their work life, home life, social life, and much more to accommodate the child’s presence. For many people who become parents—whether through birth, adoption, fostering, or kinship care—the transition radically disrupts and remakes how they move through the world.
Life transition versus transformation
Becoming a parent is more than a life transition; it is also what Paul calls a transformative experience. Transformative experiences, in the philosophical sense, prompt radical change in a person’s knowledge and values.
Dr. Sally Xie, a psychologist and Assistant Professor at Simon Fraser University, explains that transformative experiences mark a turning point with a clear before and after. A person arrives in the after with knowledge gained only through firsthand experience. “No amount of simulation or research or talking to people about it would have prepared [them],” explains Xie.
But for an event to truly be transformative, it has to change not just what someone knows, but also what they value. “One of the really interesting things about transformative experiences is that they kind of break you down psychologically, and you have to rebuild yourself,” Paul says. Our values characterize who we are at our core. If someone doesn’t shift and rearrange their core priorities after a major life change, then the transition wasn’t truly transformational.
Paul and Xie are currently collaborating on a research project to study parenting as a transformative experience. “We want to see—regardless of preparation or expectations about what parenting was like—whether new parents have the sense that they learned something really profound that they couldn’t have learned without having the experience,” Xie says. By surveying expecting parents before and after birth, they hope to better understand the ways that having children can prompt inner change and a rebuilding of self.
Three months before birth, study participants complete a survey. They tell the story of their life through high, low, and turning points. They answer questions about their normative ideas of parenting—for example, what a mother’s role should be and what a father’s role should be. They also anticipate what knowledge they’ll gain. “So the specific question we ask them is, ‘What do you think that you’ll learn from being a parent that you don’t already know?’” Three months after the birth, the parents complete a similar survey. They reflect on how accurate their hopes and fears were, and whether their expectations matched up with the reality of having a child.
Inner revelation
Another dynamic that the research explores is spiritual revelation. Transformative life events can lead to spiritual awakenings, and not necessarily in the religious sense. Paul defines these nonreligious spiritual awakenings as revelation.
Revelation is a discovery that reveals itself to you, often through a new experience. Picture standing at the edge of the ocean, looking toward the horizon, when a wave rises up to meet you. An awareness of its power dawns on you with a new immediacy. In this case, the wave is a kind of natural revelation.
But revelation can occur internally too. “You can also have revelation when you discover something about yourself,” says Paul. In the case of parenting, you discover a new capacity within yourself for loving another human being. Of course, parental love isn’t superior to other forms of love you might have known, but it is distinct. Loving a sibling or a spouse or a parent or a friend doesn’t map precisely onto the experience of loving a child. The discovery of your own parental love can be a form of revelation, a spiritual awakening.
Your capacity to love your child is revealed to you, often with sudden and awe-inspiring force, in the same way a wave rises up to meet you.
Despite its transformative potential, becoming a parent isn’t guaranteed to produce transformation. Paul says that receptivity to an experience informs whether or not it changes someone on a fundamental level. “There’s a kind of openness to changing how you value people and things in the world, and how you understand yourself as being in the world, that I think is needed to find parenting to be transformative.”
There’s also a condition of irreversibility that needs to accompany the experience. The event is the hinge point between a before and an after. When you experience transformation, whether through becoming a parent or another life change, the person you become is different from who you were before. There’s no going back. Xie adds relationships are the heart of what makes an experience transformative. “It’s part of the element of surprise, not knowing what to expect because there’s another person on the other end,” she says. “They’re changing your expectations and knowledge and values in a way that’s very profound.”
Annelise Jolley is a journalist and essayist who writes about place, food, ecology, and faith for outlets such as National Geographic, The Atavist, The Rumpus, and The Millions. Find her at annelisejolley.com.
