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My dad likes to say that he hasn’t had a full night’s sleep since February 4, 1989, the night before my brother was born.
About this time last year, I was wide awake. It was the middle of the night, and I rocked my son in his nursery. He couldn’t have been much more than a week old.
In those early days, my wife and I made it a sport of waking up, feeding him, and getting him back down as quickly and quietly as we could. A good turn was 45 minutes. This one had been going on for about 90.
Tired and frustrated, I took a long breath and looked down at him. Goose, as I’ll call him here, stared back up at me with wide eyes. There’s no way I was more than a silhouette in his infant night vision. But he recognized I was there.
I recognized it back. And for the first time in my life, I felt that there was no place else I could be in that moment. I was fulfilled.
A few months later, Anna and Goose left town to visit family on the East Coast for the summer. I waited in New Orleans for a week before driving up to meet them.
During these quiet days, I found myself walking into his room now and then, sitting in the rocker, taking in the smell, and looking at the empty crib.
The emptiness overwhelmed me, and for some reason, I said hello to him, even though he was hundreds of miles away. Some part of me was trying to will him back—back to the place in my mind where we belonged together, rocking in the darkness.
But the unintended effect was that, for the first time I could remember, I was talking to myself.
Let’s get one thing straight: The first year of milestones isn’t for the kids. It’s for the parents.
Some of these moments stick out sharp in your memory. Some are feelings that can linger for days or weeks before we acknowledge them.
I felt utterly useless, then helpless, as the doctor at Ochsner Baptist coached Anna to breathe and push in her calm cadence. As our son emerged, with the cord around his neck, I greeted his silence with gritted teeth (a moment regrettably captured on camera).
He remained quiet even as the nurses worked deliberately to untangle him, clean his face, and rub him to incite a cry, which did not come. When they placed him on his mother, I had no idea if this was the best or worst moment of my life.
“Well,” a nurse mused, as if she’d found a dollar on the ground, “I guess he’s just chill.”
The relief mixed nauseously with the latent dread. I’d witnessed a miracle—THE miracle. Just a minute ago, I was joking with the residents about my wife’s playlist. Now I stood in petrified silence listing, like a ship taking on water.
The things kids will do to you.
Goose started daycare after Labor Day. He didn’t seem to care all that much when we dropped him off on that first morning. That emotional burden fell to us.
But in the week after, a strange uncanny feeling overtook me. One I was afraid to admit.
Something about him was different. Partly in the way he looked, like some of his innocent cuteness had hardened. And a bit in the way he acted, like he’d just learned there were people other than us and was excited about it.
For a couple of days, I wrestled with these thoughts. I flitted through photos and videos on my phone to confirm the phenomenon. Afraid to say it out loud, I tried to suppress it.
“You know,” my wife said as I rocked him in his chair one night, “I’ve had this weird feeling since he started daycare.”
“Like he’s changed?” I asked.
She’d noticed. She’d wrestled. She’d suppressed. Now, even if we didn’t have our old baby, at least we were in it together.
Goose was back to his bubbly, full-cheek-smiling self after a couple of days in the clink. Still, something had changed.
His world had widened beyond our home, and we were feeling that expansion in real time.
The most recent “first” occurred days before his first birthday party. Mardi Gras had ended. Valentine’s Day had passed. My wife noted that we’d missed celebrating it due to the onslaught of parades.
His last first holiday, and we didn’t notice.
It struck me that most of his big “firsts” passed unremarkably, at least in his eyes. He took a fat drooly snooze on his mom’s shoulder during church on his first Easter. On his first Christmas, we opened most of his presents, while he played with paper scraps.
At the same time, a year of firsts was over. And we wouldn’t get them back.
For the first time, I realized how fast it was gone. And how fast it was going to go from here on out. My heart sank a little, and I thought not of the past, but the future: his fifth birthday, or tenth birthday. Us looking back on years of moments that seem to have gone by before we could process them.
So at his birthday party this past weekend, I tried to “live in the moment.” After we sang to him—then blew out his candle for him—I looked into his deep brown eyes as he took in the room of friends and family buzzed from a smorgasbord of subs, nuggets, and booze.
For a second, I thought back to that night when we rocked together silently. I felt every first that’s happened since. All these moments that have whipped my ass into shape so that I’ll be emotionally conditioned for however many years of fatherhood I’ll get.
That’s worth losing some sleep over.