I mean, duh. But the nuance is Baby is just part of becoming a dad. It’s more than a role and responsibilities and a name. I’m becoming a version of myself I genuinely love, but before I have the emotional tools to handle the harder bits.

My big struggle is that I don’t understand what a healthy steady state is.

I’m actually used to things getting harder. I’m used to things getting worse. I am comfortable with everything being on fire.

I am the fire as much as Jim Lahey is the liquor.

As I think back on the past 12 years of my life since I graduated college, I cannot think of a time where there was a true lull in the chaos. Maybe in the 6 weeks between my Army career ended and my MBA began? But that still was a frenzy of moving and FOMO.

Even as the overall trajectory of my life seems to get consistently better and better, I fear I view myself fundamentally as someone who performs best when the chips are down. Well, I don’t fear it. I know it.

I’ve always been proud of that. It helped shape who I am. It helped me understand my role in the world and in my social groups. I step up when others are floundering. I can carry the weight on my back. I got you. Just call me Atlas.

I now realize this may make me seek the harder path.

The emergency path. The “nothing gets done unless it’s on fire and I can rationalize why I need to focus on this specific thing instead of everything else for the next few hours” path. The perfectionist path that I use to fake meaning in my work in the absence of a real problem.

In this case, it appears to me that I am treating these drafts (8 by last count) as more important than they are. These are not missives chiseled in stone. The whole point was for this to be the raw stuff. It’s supposed to be the knotty, complicated mess of feelings that Dads feel at 11pm and 6am and at 3 in the afternoon when you are trying to decide if you need to stop work early to go help out with the disaster unfolding in the next room over. It’s a record of my reality as it unfolds.

I don’t normally write like this. I write and rewrite. I polish. I sit on it and then in an emergency frenzy I push 8 hours of focus into it and voila. It exists.

Here has to be different. I want to capture the energy of when we are close to the thing. These essays are a snapshot of the muddlebrained, sleep-deprived chains of thought that characterize this era of my life.

This is how clockworkly the past 4 months has gone.

I put my son down for a nap or perhaps bedtime. He’ll chaos monkey for a dice roll’s amount of time. Grasping kicking hooting hollering. A real squirmy worm. He’s eating eating eating distracted then eating again. A cat comes in and he giggles at her. Eventually he hits a wall (or I find a better grip and pin his arms in some secret, relaxing technique) and I can rock him to sleep. This last bit is where I can downshift my mind. In the last 15 to 45 minutes of eye-of-the-storm reflection I settle into ideas of what to write about.

Some are good ideas, many are fine, most are real, and a couple are what I wish were real or what I think might happen next or perhaps even genuinely clever and/or a touch insightful. Beautifully, they exist and I get them quickly down into my notes, screen turned down to 15% brightness so as not to disturb the dead weight boy in my arms, and if I am really on it then I write up a draft before bed and there is the problem. I’m rarely really on it.

I sit on the draft because it’s not cleaned up. I don’t clean it up because that’s boring and hard. And when I finally do go to clean it up, I have lost the momentum of the piece and no longer have the spirit to ride it to publishing. And the notes that never became drafts? Default dead.

This succession of false starts and all this agonizing fundamentally misunderstands parenthood.

The guilty secret of parenting is that it is mostly improvisation. You plan with your partner and try to talk about the big stuff ahead of time, maybe get advice from a few friends or family, and you probably read a book or two to prepare, but the act comes sooner than you think.

The actions. The performance?

A child performs their part with perfect authenticity. How could they not? They don’t understand the concept of inauthentic behavior yet.

So they are exactly them and you attempt to become the version of yourself that does the job well. This builds a back and forth that feeds them and you with love and information about each other. Over time, you help baby construct their world model, as well as all of the localized context models we use to make decisions every second of every day of our lives.

But our actions are filled with mistakes and these misinform baby. You’ll toss them onto the couch a little too quickly, maybe you miss catching them as they try to take a few solo steps too soon, and baby tumbles and knocks his head. You can’t quite catch them before they bother the cat slightly too much. You notice a half second too late that baby put something gross in their mouth. They cry.

You cannot edit the bad memory.

It’s done. Despite all of your wanting and instinct, you as parent are not able to directly undo any damage you cause or allow to happen. The memory is now embedded with an update to their world model. This is perhaps the foundational tragic truth of parenthood.

Your levers of control are not finely tuned. They are blunt instruments, honestly still largely the same ones our parents’ parents’ parents used. The only path forward to a better tomorrow is not to fix anything retroactively, but to create new and better memories and models to help offset the bad one.

Editing is an attempt to change instead of offset.

It’s a control freak’s panic response to the ever rippling rebellion of the real.

I just noticed how white my knuckles are on the wheel.

It’s probably time to stop trying to edit how I feel.

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It’s surprising how unsurprising it is. You tick off tropes you’ve somehow learned by heart one by one. The morning sickness. The pregnancy test. The cravings. You recognize it, but only as a voyeur.

You’ve seen the joke before and can hear the laugh track except now you’re here, part of an impossibly long cultural and biological chain of humanity and yet the physical reality of it all is happening to someone else.

You observe (probably), support (hopefully), and react (definitely) and you notice daily that every page of this unfolding story has little to do with you.

There’s an adjustment period before you realize that whatever experience you enjoyed before, you are now clearly no longer the protagonist. This adjustment hits harder if you’ve never noticed the subtle and not so subtle ways society defers to you. The unfolding moment of pregnancy feels weird and decentering because it literally is. Mama is pregnant, not you, and her needs dictate the schedules, trajectory, and every important decision you’re making for the next 9 months.

You are used to being able to do something. You can fix it. You can lift it. You can solve it. You can improve the situation or manage the outcome or at the very least avoid the worst of it by being proactive. If you can do something you are useful and if you are useful you have value and control.

The journey through pregnancy can break dad’s model of self.

You can’t fix mom’s nausea. You can’t carry baby. You truly can’t shoulder the physical burden for her in any meaningful or significant way.

You can drive to the store, get the food she’s craving, move stuff around the house (if she’s not trying to do it herself in month 8 when you aren’t looking), and you can sit with her as she’s puking. But when she’s getting assaulted by her body day after day, it’s just as likely she wants you to give her some goddamn space when she’s feeling like dogwater.

Preparing for baby as a dad feels like every day you’re punching at air.

It’s a creeping unease that squeezes harder as the pregnancy drags on. The more competent you are and the closer the big day comes, the more awareness you have of how little you’re doing relatively speaking.

So you compensate.

You turn towards the parts of your life where you feel like you can win.

Work. A project. Something in the yard. Anywhere you can identify a problem and visibly improve it. It’s the only place where your feedback loops of self worth still work.

This self-soothing is your body’s panic response to your identity shifting in real time.

Every ultrasound, heartbeat, and baby kick makes the impending outcome more real and still all you can do is support.

You know you’re supposed to be doing something.

But you have no idea what.

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You, of course, have to start small with baby.

Baby is small. They can hardly move. They don’t understand. They can’t tell you what they need. In a lot of important ways, babies are straight up unable to do anything.

So, as a parent, you do everything for them. Feed, clean, soothe, love, care, hold. All the jobs to be done.

But soon you realize there’s a limit to how much you can do for them. Two limits really.

The first is your own limits on how much you can physically give. You need food, sleep, and care too (though you pretend you don’t for as long as possible). This is the upteenth memetic metajoke you see in any scene about exhausted new parents.

The second limit is less explored, especially for young children.

Your child needs you, but the amount of you they can receive has a ceiling. You can only feed so much, you can only comfort so much, you can only control so much. Baby always gets the final vote on how much they need you at any given moment.

Parenthood’s brutal math is perhaps most surprising in that it also applies to you.

The instinct to give everything you possibly can is painfully restrained by the stark realities of how a human baby grows.

Fortunately, the ceiling of this care does change over time. It expands. It gains shape and texture and color, like a vision of rich, rolling prairie grass slowly pulling into focus in the sunrise. It’s beautiful at first glimpse, but becomes even more so with every added detail gifted by the next ounce of light.

The simple care you give at first, eventually, grows. It grows because it now has space to grow.

Your gentle feeding turns into feeding and locking eyes. Soon this turns into feeding and locking eyes and smiling together. Eventually it’s all of that, plus joyful babbling back and forth. Over time, baby develops the capacity to receive your care in new, deeper and more nuanced ways.

But every new way to care, again, starts small.

Long before a child arrives, our identity is rooted in many things. Your own witch’s brew of self will vary, but it’s likely some combination of your work, personal relationships, hobbies, media consumed, and interests. Or at least it was.

In much the same way as your baby suddenly lost its nice, calm, warm, and cozy home in the womb, you too have lost your inner home. It turns out that a lot of the things that made you you are no longer accessible after you become a parent (for at least a little while).

Some of this is the nuts and bolts of infant care.

Baby cries, you can’t sleep.

Baby cries, you put down your guitar.

Baby cries, you’ll finish that email later.

Baby cries, you close your book.

Baby cries, you can’t finish your dinner.

Even as I type this paragraph, I’ve already soothed my son back to sleep twice.

More than any single substituted activity, it’s really the focus-disrupting, always-on that reshapes your relationship with yourself bit by bit.

If you didn’t have a relationship with yourself before baby, the sheer volume of quiet care you’re giving more or less forces you to address that particular cognitobomb. You spend too many midnight hours alone in your own head to avoid the confrontation.

But if you had a relationship with yourself already, the grief creeps in. Sometimes regret too, but I’d describe it as the sensation of watching a loved one transit the final stages of terminal illness.

You saw your death coming from a mile away. You prepared as best you could. But your preparation can’t change the unblinking fact that you live the finger snap of self death over and over and over again.

Knowing isn’t the same as feeling, which isn’t the same as processing, which isn’t the same as accepting.

And accepting isn’t the same as rebecoming yourself.

The brutal math tabulates, but the figures hint at the next step.

It starts small.

It’s just a fraction of the thing you used to reach for instinctively.

Some scales instead of a song. A bite-sized task instead of a weekend project. A page instead of a chapter.

Til you get the next ounce of light.

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In truth, I didn't not want to be a dad either.

The possibility of fatherhood never really crossed my mind growing up and, frankly, before my then-girlfriend-now-wife asked me about it one sticky Florida afternoon in a Holiday Inn parking lot eleven years ago, I suspect I’d only thought about the question for perhaps a cumulative fifteen minutes.

My gut reaction was “nah”.

This did not go over as well as I expected.

Of course, I had no particular reason to say “nah” other than, at first cut, being a parent seemed like a lot of work.

I was twenty-three, in the Army, and deeply attached to the idea that my limited free time should involve less effort than my day job.

But based on the immediately tearful reaction, the question was clearly a very important one for her (rightly so!). She’d thought about it at length, definitely wanted kids, and my thoughtlessly forceful “nah” caught her completely off guard.

I paused.

Even back then, I was aware that my confident bluntness sometimes had a tendency to blow things up I did not intend to blow up.

Reflecting on my options while I sweated profusely into the cloth seat of my Nissan Versa, I decided I very much did not want to lose the one thing working out for me in my life at the time (the Army was not going that well). So I quickly backpedaled.

My “nah” became a “I need to think about it more because I’ve never really considered that possibility as a potential branch of my life”

I didn’t have the language for it then, but today I might say I confronted a nuanced truth about myself.

And thus began my dadicalization.

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