Derek Thompson wrote a wonderful essay on what happens when you become a parent:
The baby you bring home from the hospital is not the baby you rock to sleep at two weeks, and the baby at three months is a complete stranger to both. In a phenomenological sense, parenting a newborn is not at all like parenting “a” singular newborn, but rather like parenting hundreds of babies, each one replacing the previous week’s child, yet retaining her basic facial structure. “Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger,” Andrew Solomon wrote in Far From the Tree. Almost. Parenthood catapults us into a permanent relationship with strangers, plural to the extreme.