New Roommate

There is a baby in the house now. Effie has slept at home for the last nine days, representing more than 80% of her life. I shouldn't really say that she's sleeping, per se, at least not at night, but she's there, a permanent, wonderful part of the family. 

At this point, Rocky is not quite as enamored with his little sister as we are. He isn't un-enamored but he is applying the strategy that serious people apply to Tomi Lahren, ignoring her and hoping she will go away. We have had spare visitors, usually outdoors and from some distance (the number of people who have held Effie can be counted without taking your shoes off and the large percentage of those people are in the medical field), and Rocky always seems a bit disappointed that they leave without taking the baby with them. He is taking to her better than Fuzz our kitten, though, who has oscillates between wanting to smell every part of her (including each discarded diaper) and running around like a banshee when she's upset in the middle of the night. The joys of three under three. 

You aren't supposed to compare your children but I find that it's actually a lot of fun. I am retroactively discovering that Rocky may have been a difficult baby. Rocky rarely napped and required near-constant attention during the day. Because it placated him, I spent his first three months walking in ludicrous circles with him in my arms like a football, staring up at me with an expression that said "The power. The power!" Effie, at least at this point, has proven fairly serene, easy to soothe and not upset for long. I hasten even to type that as these things change on a dime but I can be grateful that its at least true at this point. Liz and I looked at baby photos of Rocky the night before Effie was born and were amazed we got so many of him bing still. He is motionless on our phones but not in our memories. As we're comparing, though, I will say that Rocky sleeps through the night for which he receives a million points for Gryffindor. He is still restless as ever, except for at the right times. Effie, bless her, has her days and nights very backwards, a near standard feature of babies her age. The Romans had a phrase for twilight—inter canem et lupum—that means "between the dog and the wolf," when the domesticated animal of the day gives way to its wild nocturnal ancestor. At night, Effie becomes both, barking and howling at once. 

Between 1838 and 1960, more than half the photos taken were of babies. I can't image that that percentage has changed much since then but I suppose the statisticians are accounting for how many modern photographs are taken of the meals people are about to eat. Of course, 10% of history's photographs were only taken in the last 12 months and in the last 12 days 100% of mine have included a baby. 

While she is imminently photographable, like all in the under-one-month set, Effie has yet to reveal her best beauty. At this point my daughter looks like W.C. Fields and Karl Malden developed an affinity for little dresses with capped sleeves. That will change, of course. It already has. She looks nothing like the little girl who was born on June 19 and is even more removed from her original fetal state, which was an anus. The first part any of us develops in the womb is a butthole and then we grow the rest of ourselves from there. I often wonder why those pro-life billboards that remind drivers that babies have toenails four weeks from conception or a heartbeat just days after being conceived don’t have a version that announces “I was an asshole from Day One.” Some babies are born without anuses, what Dr. Alexandra Hubbell tells me is called anal atresia (don’t worry, it’s rare), which puts the lie to the phrase likening that part of the anatomy and opinions. Should you be born butthole-less, they will surgically give you one, though this gentleman went 55 years without one. I was reminded of this at Effie’s birth when the nurses checked for one. After 10 days, I can confirm that works prodigiously. 

Of course, rare diseases abound when it comes to newborns. Because of their awfulness and their victim's inability to fight for themselves, these maladies soak up a lot of attention and loom large in a parent's anxieties in a way that is inconsistent with how likely they are to occur. When Liz was pregnant with Rocky I made the mistake of reading a number of pregnancy books. Pregnancy is one of the only times in the parenting experience in which you are pretty much guided by an expert the entire way. I may have read ten pregnancy books or so, certainly a good number of books on one subject in a short period of time, but ten books is nothing compared to the number of pregnancy books even the most junior obstetrician will read in the course of her studies, to say nothing of research papers, journals and other material she keeps up with on a routine basis. The point is, I did not become an expert on pregnancy, all I did was realize how many rare things are probably not waiting for my baby around every developmental corner—but could be.

I also noticed a marked difference in tone between the pregnancy books aimed at fathers and other pregnancy books, which aren't so much aimed at mothers as they simply assume the reader will be female. The dad-to-be books are pretty simple, they give tips about what to bring to the hospital, they acknowledge that the mother is the star of the show and almost all include either a patronizing introduction about what a good guy the reader is for sticking around and taking an interest in his kid or a few cringey jokes about the lack of a post-baby sex life. The other books, however, all feature a picture of a smiling or sleeping baby on the cover but are filled with pages of shame, guilt and fear. "You're pregnant, you slut," they all seem to say. "And it's bliss and blah blah blah but the first word I want you to know is preeclampsia and you will get it if you don't sufficiently love your baby." We are very lucky that both of our children were born healthy with relatively easy pregnancies. I know people who are not so lucky. We all do. Effie is less than two-weeks old, there are still so much we don't know about her development. Rocky, by all means healthy at the same point Effie is, had surgery when he was less than three months. Just by turning 1, he joined a club that includes only 60% of every human who ever existed. You can't know the future, which is unsettling enough for yourself, but becomes down-right terrifying when applied to those you love most, aggravated further by sleepless nights and feeding inconsistencies which are probably just the fickleness of the human appetite but what if its not? These are the thoughts of a new parent. 

Well, they’re some of the thoughts anyway. After all, having a child has always been the defiant act of an optimist. Given the risks and the chances of despair, a rational person would hardly enter into it. Before I had children all I heard from parents was the bad stuff—the lack of sleep, the food stains, the expense, the chapped nipples, the total erasure of your previous life—which are thrown at you at every opportunity. I think parents swap disaster stories like these because they’re relatable. Our wonderful language is well equipped to translate these woes into words. Stress. Frustration. Exhaustion. But the good stuff doesn’t travel as far. Our language, with its hundreds of thousands of words, is great at getting across the universal and there is solace in knowing that other parents are suffering as you are. Parenting isn’t suffering, though, and in the face of the beauty of it, English is woefully inadequate. A child born of Shakespeare and Eudora Welty would be totally unequal to describing for you what it felt like when my milk-drunk daughter spent an hour on my chest as if I were the only thing in the world last week. I’d trade ever sleeping again for just a few more minutes of that feeling and I’d have made a bargain. That I’ll get that feeling regularly and my sleep back in due time is as strong an endorsement for parenting as I can make.