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| It helps that he's crazy cute |
My son, Alex, just turned three months old and I’m a full-time dad now — at least for the next eight or nine weeks while I’m on parental leave.
These first months have been a whirlwind. I think I’ve been trying, and failing, to catch up on sleep ever since those first couple nights I spent on the fold-down couch in our hospital room. There are many things about my dad that I now appreciate even more, and one of them is that he spent 140 straight nights on one of those couches when I was hospitalized with meningitis.
I would love to say that it has been all rapturous joy for me since the moment Alex was born, but that wouldn’t be true. It is quite an adjustment, this parenthood thing. Alex is, I think, a pretty easy baby overall. But it’s strange when your schedule is suddenly dictated entirely by an 8-pound human being with a strong set of lungs. Especially when you’ve spent the first 20 years of adulthood without kids, largely able to use your free time as you see fit.
I also think the bonding process is a little different for dads than for moms, who have already gotten to know their babies in a very special way long before they’re born. For me, the first week or two after we brought him home were strange. There was a baby in my house, but I was still trying to wrap my head around the idea that he was my baby.
That’s not to say there haven’t been times of rapturous joy. I can recall at least three times in the early days when I was actually brought to tears by Alex. One was when he was born, via c-section, in an operating room. I bawled my eyes out when they brought him from around that curtain and we saw him for the first time, all purple and screaming. I was snapping pictures like crazy and I can remember asking the nurse “Can I touch him?” and her nodding. I could tell she was grinning even though she was wearing a surgical mask.
I also cried, though more subtly, the first time I gave him a bottle. There was something about watching him latch onto it with his mouth, something about being able to put nourishment into that tiny, hungry body, that was just overwhelming emotionally. Yet another reason I think it’s easier for moms to bond with their little ones.
The third time I can remember tearing up was when I was rocking him to sleep in our nursery. We had spent months getting that room ready, getting the glider chair in the right place and getting the shelves set up around it so everything — books, Kleenex, burp clothes, etc. — was within arms-length of the chair. The last thing we did was install a blackout curtain, just a couple days before he was born. I remember, after getting that done, telling myself, “OK, now we’re ready.” I was so naive. But when he was finally home, and I was sitting in the chair in a dark room, rocking slowly and listening to soft classical music as he fell asleep in my arms, I remember thinking “OK, this is it. Soak it up, because it doesn’t get any better than this.” And I cried.
Here are some other miscellaneous observations from the first three months:
My wife is a hero
I knew my wife was amazing before Alex was born, but I didn’t fully appreciate how amazing. She was in labor/pre-labor for basically two days, then had a surgery in which they cut through every layer of her abdomen, and then went right into breastfeeding around the clock a few hours later. And she’s been doing it ever since, feeding him every few hours during the day, and several times a night. I don’t know how she’s doing it. She’s working on significantly less sleep than I am and she’s doing it all with a more consistent, better mood than me. I’ve been up and down emotionally. She’s been rock solid.
I’m an old dad
I turned 41 a couple months after Alex was born. Earlier this year I started to feel some persistent soreness in my left knee. I saw an orthopedic specialist who turned my knee in a few different directions, asked if it hurt, and then said maybe I had a partially torn meniscus. If so, he said I would need a minor outpatient procedure and I’d probably be good as new in a couple weeks. That didn’t sound so bad.
But when the results of the MRI came back he said, “Well, it’s not a torn meniscus. You just have osteoarthritis in your knee.” There’s no procedure for that. Just ibuprofen, Voltaren, and a knee brace. This is not great when standing up and bouncing Alex for 20 minutes or so is the only way to calm him down. Maybe I should wear my knee brace more.
A few months before Alex was born I also noticed that my vision, which had been better than 20/20 most of my life, was starting to get a little fuzzy. I went to the optometrist and he confirmed it: I have age-related vision loss. I was like, “But it came on so suddenly.” And he said, “Oh yeah, that’s how it happens. You get into your 40s, and boom.” Which is a bummer, because I had always thought of my vision as kind of like my superpower, especially after I became physically disabled in other ways. Maybe there were things I couldn’t do any more, but I could still wow my friends and family by reading small print on billboards far away.
Not any more. Now I need glasses, and that means it hurts when I’m holding Alex and he bops his face against mine inexplicably. Maybe I should look into LASIK.
My age also means it’s probably not the best time in my life to cart around a small human being who keeps getting heavier. First I noticed a knot in my upper back, near my left shoulder blade. Lately that has dissipated and been replaced by a pinch in my lower back, near my waistband. Maybe I should stretch more.
One good thing about becoming a dad later in life, though: Alex usually wakes me up at least once or twice a night, so I use those times to go pee. I was going to have to eventually anyway.
I’m a disabled dad (and that’s OK)
When I imagined being a dad in the abstract, I wasn’t really worried about the fact that I can’t walk without leg braces and I’m missing most of my fingers. I just kind of assumed I would figure things out, much like I did when I first had my amputations.
But then, as Rachael’s due date came closer, I started remembering exactly how much work it took to figure things out. It took months. Years even.
Then I started to worry a little. I looked for stories about parents with disabilities who could tell me how it’s done. The best I could find was this book out of Australia, which put my mind at ease some.
Since Alex was born, I think the most frustrating part about being a dad with disabilities is that if he’s fussy at night, I can’t just jump up out of bed, pick him up and soothe him. I can pull him out of his bedside bassinet and try to do it sitting in bed with him, but that doesn’t always work. And that doesn’t let Rachael sleep like it would if I could take him to another room. If I’m going to get up and take him to the nursery, for example, I’ve got to put my leg braces on and it’s a slow process and by the time I’m done he’s usually full-on wailing. Then everybody’s up anyway. So Rachael has taken on a lot of the overnight responsibility and I feel bad about that, but she’s a warrior and she never complains. Plus, she can feed him, which is what he usually wants anyway.
I’ve also found that a lot of baby clothes are just not made for people with limited fine-motor skills. All those little zippers and snaps, ugh. Trying to pull a tight onesie up over his head when he’s already fussy is also an adventure. There are some baby clothes, however, that fasten with magnets sewn into the fabric. They are awesome.
Some able-bodied dads, like Bradley Cooper, say they relish every diaper change. I do not. For me, it’s a ponderous process and there have been times when Alex is screaming on the changing table and I have literally said out loud, “OK, I don’t like this either. I, too, wish this was going faster.” I will say, though, that unlike the makers of baby clothes, the makers of baby diapers seem to have tried to engineer their products to be easier to put on with one hand. Which is extremely helpful. I’ve also found that it makes things go faster if I have everything out and ready (the wipes, the Desitin, the fresh diaper), before I start the process.
It’s still a bit of a panicky situation when he starts peeing on the wall as soon as I get the dirty diaper off him. But I’m fast becoming a diaper changing pro, especially now that I’m on leave and get to practice several times a day.
The logistical challenges of being a disabled dad are all surmountable in one way or another, especially with a supportive partner like Rachael. I do still have some anxieties about when Alex gets older and I can’t play catch with him like the other dads, and the kids at school ask him “why do your dad’s hands look so funny?”
But we will cross that bridge when we come to it, and hopefully in a way that will make him even more sensitive and accepting of people who are different.
For now, the cool thing is that he doesn’t know that I’m different, even when he wraps his tiny fingers around what’s left of my hands. He just knows that I’m the guy who holds him, and rocks him and occasionally gives him a bottle. That’s enough to make him smile in the morning when he sees me. And that’s enough to make this whole crazy journey worthwhile.
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