my hobby has become noticing

Ever since I made a new person, my primary interest is “people"

Once, when I was pregnant, we were walking home from dinner around 9 p.m. and passed a new dad pacing up and down the block holding a tiny baby, who presumably would only sleep under these specific circumstances. That is parenthood, I thought, and now I often wonder about him and how the baby has grown when I find myself on that same street.

The other day I was picking my son up from daycare and we stopped in at a cafe across the street that sells homey Italian food and artisanal soft serve. A mom in business clothes was just ahead of us in line along with her daughter, who looked to be maybe five or six. The mom bought something small, like a water to go, and asked for two samples of the daily soft serve. She and the cashier briefly discussed the merits of this week’s flavor versus last’s, making it clear this harmless grift was a semi regular occurrence. Then she and her daughter sat down to eat their thimble-sized servings of soft serve. If we stay in this neighborhood, someday that could be us, I said to my son.

The sun sets so late these days so I took him to the park after pick up recently. We sat on a bench and watched Brooklyn go by. Two boys, probably not yet in middle school, walked by just as one was insisting Wayne Gretzky still held the record for records(?). A teen with a terrible tangled mop of orange-ish bleached hair said to a girl with tiny front braids, “this is stupid, but I have stocks. Like the stock market.” And my heart swelled for him when she reassured him that it was, in fact, “not stupid.”

I tried to imagine my son’s future hobbies, his friends, and crushes. It’s amazing how many stages are still to come.

There was a little girl in great sparkly Crocs at the farmers market. A pair of parents taking their five-month-old to the playground for the first time and cooing at each other that he’s still too small for the swings, but maybe soon. A boy in baseball gear scooters too fast down the paved path into the park and wipes out. I brace for cries that don’t come and admire his caretaker’s calm as she asks him if he’s like to sit and have a sip of water while he recovers.

In the morning I take my son to daycare and witness a panoply of Brooklyn parents doing the same. A girl with white-blonde hair names all the street-parked cars they pass to her mother, starting with a Honda Pilot. Dads in suits carry tiny pink scooters and Elsa-themed helmets, the drop-off already done. On a dreary day, I see a mom crossing the street while carrying her daughter and pushing an empty stroller — never in all my hours of pre-parenthood research did I consider that the baby would simply reject whatever optimal stroller we ultimately selected, but often he does. Halfway across the street, her daughter’s lemon-yellow rubber rain boot falls off. I want to help her but I’m crossing perpendicularly and the traffic is still coming. By the time the light changes, she has managed to scoop up the rogue shoe, made it to the other side, and is threading her daughter’s stockinged foot back into the boot in mid-air.

All around me, people are parenting other, smaller, people who are engaged in the mercurial alchemy of growing up. I’ve become obsessed with watching it happen.

Motherhood has made a more empathetic person. I’m bigger and stupider and less creative. My calling card — thinking quickly — is compromised in ways I can only hope is temporary. But this I can claim unambiguously: I am endlessly attuned to the humanity happening in my purview. Forget the self-congratulating implication of generosity inherent in empathy, I mean I literally can’t stop noticing the many lives that suddenly seem intensely relevant to me because they are parents, or babies, or kids, or former kids, or former babies. I notice them and the ways they are trying seem so relatable to me. Sorry for this treacle but: Ever since I made a new person, my primary interest is “people.”

What’s surprised me is how automatic this noticing has become. It’s easy, effortless, inescapable. Indulgent even. Of course motherhood changed me, but it’s not all hard-won growth forged in fire. What I enjoy has changed, or at least expanded, too. I don’t have to psyche myself up to read the same book for the umpteenth time. My mind wants to meal plan new flavors and careful introduction of allergens. And it doesn’t feel like righteous homework to be interested in the lives of others, it feels good — like watching HGTV, only without any schadenfreude.

That distinction is key. I know I’m skirting a couple of pitfalls with this rosy version of parental voyeurism. So allow me some caveats: First, you do not have to have a baby to care about other people. The point is not to equate parenthood (done by plenty of cruel, careless assholes) and empathy (possessed by plenty of thoughtful childless folk). Also, I know I am romanticizing the watching while ignoring the experience of being watched. Parenthood opens you up to judgement and fear of judgement and the deepest fear that the judgers are on to something. This essay is not about that. It’s not about the way society can seemingly make any dynamic — non-parents versus parents, parents versus parents — into a tense, zero-sum standoff. I'm writing about something smaller and softer. I’ve aired plenty of grievances in this space and now I want to try to tell you about how alive it makes me feel to find quiet commonality with strangers.

And that’s the other remarkable part — I seek out the parallels. For more than 30 years, I clung to precious individuality. I craved proof that everything about me — from my perspective to my pain — was special. I didn’t want to find connection and rejected the wisdom that writing should be relatable. I assumed, or hoped, that the ways in which I seemed tethered to the boring realness of my community were only temporary. But now I not only notice the way my son’s precise age situates me along a well-worn timeline familiar to most parents, I actively want to embed myself in the stage as well as the specifics. I want to give to him all the trappings of a Brooklyn baby, make his life a local cliche so he can choose for himself which parts to reject and which to someday treasure as emblematic of his childhood. Pictures with the cherry blossoms at the botanic garden, apple cider donuts at the market, fighting the weekend crowds for the swings at the consensus best playground that always has an ice cream truck parked just outside. Here we are, I think in all these places, looking just like a family because we are one.

On the phone with a baseball coach for a story, he tells me that he got in late from a cross-country roadtrip, but was still able to take his son to school that morning and the words don’t just wash over me. They work their way into my brain viscerally — the relief, the exhaustion, the way routine can feel special and even poignant.

Forget elbows and injuries, I want to ask about more important things like: What did they talk about on the way in? What are the hopes and fears that accompany nearing the end of elementary school? And when they got there, did his son lean in for a hug or a kiss goodbye? If not, could he tell me at precisely what age that sort of thing stopped? I want to be prepared.