Three bodies
On adding a daughter to the mix.
Associations, the engines of creativity, work in strange ways. It hadn’t occurred to me to write a post about how my life and home were transformed a few days ago by the arrival of Eliana, my first child. But I was reading a fascinating New York Times feature story about the three-body problem, a concept I hadn’t encountered. The idea that caught my attention was that adding a third of anything changes everything. It multiplies the number of relationships and variables:
Notably, the jump also shows up in human life as groups of three cause social complexities to soar — markedly in young families. Two siblings have one relationship. But a third child results in seven kinds of ties among the siblings — three one-on-one relationships, three one-on-two relationships and one group relationship. Parents, by definition, are outnumbered, and bedlam can ensue.1
This evening I found myself living the home-life I’ve always envisioned as an ideal — with music playing, television off, a meal together at a dining-room table, a stack of books, and family — and I must give credit where credit is due. The noisy little creature with her mother’s piercing eyes and capacious lungs has, within a few days of her arrival, restructured our world for the better. What was a happy dyad of my wife and I is now, in terms of group dynamics, a set of seven happy relationships.2
What’s more, six of these relationships are new. My wife and I know each other well, but until this week, we hadn’t known each other as parents. And we’ll encounter our daughter continuously as she grows and changes. She’s not some sort of blend of us, but an entirely unique being who happens to have our genetic material and the environment we provide as starting points. I look forward to meeting her again and again.
William J. Broad, “The Terror of Threes in the Heavens and on Earth,” N.Y. Times (June 26, 2023).
(1) Nora + Ryan, (2) Nora + Eliana, (3) Nora + (Ryan & Eliana), (4) Ryan + Eliana, (5) Ryan + (Nora & Eliana), (6) Eliana + (Ryan & Nora), (7) Ryan + Nora + Eliana.
Ryan McCarl is a founding partner of Rushing McCarl LLP and the author of Elegant Legal Writing (forthcoming, U. Cal. Press 2024). He is also an adjunct legal writing professor at LMU Loyola School of Law and former research fellow in AI Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law. Second Stage is his personal blog.
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