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Comment by gldalmaso | Hacker News Reader

I couldn't agree more with Jeff. I myself have said it on multiple ocasions, having a kid is an emotional roller coster. It's amazing just how much you fall in love with them and with life, but there also quite a few moments where you just wanna disappear, leave it all behind and just... rest...

These times are a real challenge. You HAVE to deal with it, you just cannot give up, and most of the time there isn't really anyone else that can cover for you.

It is, by far, the most difficult thing I've ever done.

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Parenthood is kind of a good rehearsal for founding a company: you won't sleep much, you're very emotionally invested, you're on the hook for everything, and boy is it hard without the right partner.

Parenthood also makes founding a company 100 times harder, because you don't have the luxury of throwing yourself into the company 100% and never looking back. You have other responsibilities, and just letting them go to concentrate on your business comes at the cost of not being there for these wonderful little beings that you brought into the world.

And quitting your job to try a startup is fraught with a whole new peril -- you've got a family to feed!

I can imagine starting a part-time lifestyle business and taking it full-time if it ever became successful enough, but never a full-on work-til-you-can't-work-anymore startup. People who can do this after they have kids have my utmost respect, but I genuinely don't know how they can do it.

Maybe it's founding a company is a good rehearsal for parenthood? Having done the former, I'm terrified of the latter!

true! i've done both - had a baby when my startup was 3 years old, and it made parenting much easier to have gone through that whole everything-at-stake emotional roller coaster once before. I had the same partner in both ventures, so it was particularly good practice. amazing how similar startups and babies are! (and Jeff's pain/pleasure pie chart could easily apply to either, imo)

"It's amazing just how much you fall in love with them"

And how quickly - I can vividly remember being handed my son by the midwife and having the immediate reaction of "my overriding concern in life is now to protect and love this wee thing".

For me the main discovery is that of pure bidirectional unconditional love

Sure, I loved him from the start, but he really wasn't very interactive in the beginning and definitely a lot of work. For me the true bond really came when the little guy started following me everywhere, crawling with great effort, just not to lose sight of me.

Yes, it is a burden when I am trying to fix a cup of coffee and he's standing there holding my leg making it difficult to walk from the counter to the sink, but the joyous expression he gets when I instead bend down on my knees and tickle him or blow on his stomach is pure happiness worth all the work we've put in so far :)

Thanks for writing that first paragraph. It was not an instant thing with me either... the first 2-3 months (maybe more) were spent helping taking care of and playing with my daughter and wondering now what... And then she started cracking open a smile every time I came back from work/groceries/etc. Every time. It was a simple acknowledgement, and I fell for it...

Yes, the first three months come with very little reward, it's exhausting. During that time almost all I can remember is my daughter crying, she cried to take a bath, to change diapers, from gas. And maybe the worst was that she cried really, really loud, affording comments from doctors and other professionals (that are in frequent contact with different kids) that she had "good lungs" or "strong personality".

Then at four months she teething started early and she couldn't even sooth herself by biting toys, so it was a real burden for everyone.

It was only after that period that things really started to look better, with her interacting more and developing a more visible personality.

I heard somewhere that babies should actually spend three more months in gestation, but can't since we started to walk upright and now have a narrower birth canal. I think it's a very elucidative theory, because in that period I really don't think that babies are ready to face the world.

Sure, this is not bidi in the very beginning, and later it can get messy.

I don't know, reports suggest a lot of people give up.

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