visible artifacts

By: Chris Malek

Nov 28 2008

Category: Articles

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My daughter Edith is turning one year old on Sunday.  It seems almost incredible that a whole year has passed.  I still clearly remember  her birth.   It was raining, just as it was yesterday morning and Jessica and I walked around outside in the drizzle during early labor.  Our doula said that the rain was good luck, and it felt like it.  How cold it was in the labor and delivery room, because Jessica felt hot.   I had two sweaters on, and two blankets as I tried to sleep in the recliner in the room.  It was a long labor.

Edie was just an abstraction to me until I saw her face emerge from her mother.   She had always been generalized and abstracted, a cloud with the word “baby” written in it (we didn’t find out whether she was a girl or a boy beforehand), but but in that instant, she became a person, and my daughter.  My first child.   She became real, and our lives changed, and not slowly, but suddenly, like a jump cut between two completely scenes.

All the parents I know who have young children told me that my life would change and tried to list the ways, but again this was theoretical knowledge, very much like the difference between what we learned in birth classes and the actual experience birth.  They were right, of course, my life did change (our lives changed), but in ways that only became real to me when I experienced them.  And I’ve learned things about myself.   People told me that would happen, too.

Things I learned about myself:

• The actual birth didn’t make me pass out.  I wasn’t even close.  Which pleases me, because I’m pretty squeamish around blood.
• I’m a proud parent. Every time Edie  does something she’s never been able to do before, I feel tremendously proud.   I feel like beating my chest and announcing to the neighborhood: “My daughter now will eat zucchini.  Hear me, and rejoice!”
• I’m a competitive parent. Mildly so, but it’s there.  I joked with Jessica that I would be like that, but I never thought it would actually be true.  If Edie learns to do something before her peers in her daycare class, again I feel very proud, and sorry for the other parents.  Although if she’s not first, it doesn’t seem to bother me.
• I can watch her play for hours without feeling bored.
• I feel contented when I’m with her. It’s very easy to put the rest of  my life on hold when I’m with her.
• I don’t find sleep deprivation to be so bad. I can still deal with life pretty well with not much sleep.  I’m just a lot stupider when I’m sleep deprived.
• I don’t mind changing diapers. I thought, before she was born, that it would be most dreadful.  But it’s no big deal.

Unexpected changes to my life:

• Time is precious, more precious that it had ever been for me before Edie was born.  I am frugal with my time now, focusing only on the things that need to be done, and messing around only a little.
• Being sick is no longer enjoyable. I always enjoyed being sick and staying home from work.  It was like a mini-vacation.  No more.  Now I get much more sick than I used to, and sickness typically means the vicious cycle of infant enabled illness in which I can’t get the rest I need.  And I get sick more than once per month instead of once every few years.
• It’s difficult to stick to a schedule when she’s around.  She does things in her own schedule, which means mine takes the backseat.  She needs to be fed, and changed, and helped to sleep.  So planning to cut the grass or study at a certain time is just not practical unless Jessica can watch her or she’s asleep.
• My child’s sleep is critical. Ensuring she gets her sleep at the right time and for the right amount is the most important thing in the world.    She needs two naps, and to go to bed at 7pm, and nothing is as important as helping her to sleep at those times.  When we get those those right,  life is much, much easier.