😆 Sounds very accurate to a normal parental experience indeed.

I don't know if it's necessarily hormonal. I mean... Everything brain related is, perhaps. I don't know about such things. But it's mostly for me about how beautiful it is to have such a purely innocent being put their full trust in you and love you unconditionally (whether by instinct or not). You get to have an extremely tight emotional bond with someone who is completely dependent on you, and that really sharpens your morals. It grows you the fk up. You start having a lot more empathy, even if you thought you had a lot of it before.

It just changes you, completely. Like, I've explained it now, in some pretty well-chosen few words, but there's still this explanatory gap here that will never be bridged by words, only through experience. It's... hard to explain. 😅

You even feel a little conned, sometimes. Always tired, annoyed, want to be alone, stuff like that. Then when the kids are away for a day or more, "I miss them". Like what the actual F. 🤡 Am I infested with brain parasites or am I a parent?