Shecky Turns One
Shecky turns one tomorrow and I wanted to take a moment to commemorate the milestone. This year has passed like a slow-motion lightning strike. Longest days (nights), shortest year, etc… Shecky’s birth (which I attempted to rehash with my wife last night as we going to sleep and which she absolutely did not care to recall) has the texture of a distant and long-overshadowed memory. An anecdote. Or maybe, more accurately, it feels like the set up to a punch line.
We suddenly had a newborn infant where before there’d been only two dogs, free time and several months out of the year where we were independent; my wife tracking tortoises in the desert, me back home doing whatever I used to do with my long empty hours. Newborn Shecky did not magically conjure the joyful, rewarding fulfillment we’d been missing our entire lives. She was a huge, stressful pain in the ass that we were unprepared to accommodate. From us, she required vigilant attention, amateur nursing skills and Geneva Convention-violating sleep deprivation. I did not love every minute of it. If you read my posts from those early months you know this is an understatement. I discovered new levels of self-pity and self-loathing in Shecky’s shrill wail and could consider only the harrowing loss of my previous freedom while endlessly bouncing her in the dark.
Yes, I loved her, but that was such a baseline status it didn’t often puncture the haze of dread I’d manufactured. After reading some of my posts, people would ask my wife if I was okay. Of course I wasn’t okay. I was caring for an infant. Having a newborn is a miraculous blessing. But caring for an infant is a terrible thing to wish on anyone and I refuse to revise my assessment of that time. At least Shecky was more adorable than she had any right being and at least I didn’t have to do it alone. Solo parents of newborns should be given medals of honor, purple hearts and tickertape parades. (I won’t get political here, but those early days galvanized my already radical politics).
Shecky slowly became more responsive and interactive (and, if possible, even cuter). While I was entertaining an 18-month-old at dinner the other night, his mother observed that I seem to enjoy an audience. That’s a polite way to put it, but yes. Somewhere around 3–4 months, Shecky grew some basic audience skills and things started to improve. As she subtly transitioned into babyhood, the howling existential void couldn’t quite compete with her bright burbling gibberish, gaping grins and weekly developmental leaps. She can sit up, she can eat solid foods, she can crawl, she can cruise, she can twerk!
I have come to recognize that I’m baby crazy. I love ‘em. They’re beautiful and soft and warm and sweet-smelling and hilarious and curious and growing and changing and exploring and they will bite your tongue and step on your eye and fart in your hand while calling their spit-out food, “dada,” and they just don’t give a goddamn about anything, in the best possible way.
So finally, my wife and I were experiencing that promised joy, reward and fulfillment. The lingering, daily struggle was that Shecky slept like shit. My wife bore the direct brunt of the nightly chaos, but the fallout from us both being harshly under-slept seemed to affect everything, from our smallest interactions to the big life decisions we were now being forced to make on what felt like an hour-to-hour basis. We agreed that some kind of sleep training had to happen but we were so tapped out that it took us months to research and agree upon a training strategy. I indulged in the magical thought that if only we could “solve” the sleep problem, everything would get better.
Believe the fucking hype. Everything got better. Not perfect, but unquestionably better. Like I said, I loved Shecky from day one. But wow do I love her now that she goes down easily and regularly stays down for 11–12 hours a night. I won’t say outright that I love her MORE because of it, but I won’t avoid implying it.
Shecky’s an absolute joy. She’s a happy, easy baby who engages in deep, meaningful eye contact. She’s not fussy, not moody or cranky without obvious reason, and she’s still in that pre-toddler sweet spot — fun and playful and not yet asserting her will with the belligerent brutal destructiveness of a Republican. Yes, there’s a whole list of things I cannot do in her presence without suffering baby-sized consequences, including: brushing my teeth, eating or drinking anything, using a pen, wielding a tissue, tying or untying a shoe, exposing my keys or wallet, reading mail, playing guitar, using a toilet and yelling at the dogs. And it can be tedious to watch her for more than an hour as she bumbles from couch to toy piano to stack of books to record collection to dog bowl to hamper to stove to records to dogs to mouth on the toilet seat, repeat repeat repeat. But it beats the hell out of 3am yoga ball duty.
The big challenge is time. My wife and I both don’t get how this is supposed to work. How do you spend enough quality time with the baby while still feeding everyone decently, earning enough money to sustain things, treating the dogs humanely and occasionally getting in some exercise and/or personal time? It doesn’t add up. As if to prove my point, I’ve run out of the time I bartered to sneak away to a coffee shop to write this and I have to now put it on hold with no clear sense of when I’ll be able to finish it.
It’s night and I’ve just put her down, though I can hear her fighting sleep and it’s beyond distracting. I cannot write with her crying out, though I did manage to add a sentence over the course of the day and edit a couple phrases.
Okay, I think it’s finally safe. My wife is out with friends and the baby has stopped whimpering. There is laundry to fold, there are dishes to do and I want so badly to watch TV, but this might be my last opportunity to work on this for at least a week, more likely two. And that’s the crux of what I’m currently wrestling with. Friends swear that time will return at some point. It might take five years or so, but eventually things will open up. I don’t believe them, just as I didn’t believe them when they said that infant agony would abate. The fact that they were right about that, doesn’t carry any weight with me about the time thing.
And even if they are right, can I really go five (or three or two) years without a consistent creative practice? I will not suffer homilies about the creative aspects of child-raising, nor will my wife suffer the anxiety and frustration I will wallow in if I don’t start making stuff soon. Most importantly, I don’t want my child’s view of parenthood being self-abnegation and her model of life being the extended throttling of one’s interior realms and aspirations. But even as I write this, I wonder if I really mean it or if it’s an accepted way of me asserting my selfish desires. I really do care about the meaning of life I transmit to Shecky via my lived behavior, but do I deep-down care more about getting to live that meaningful life myself ?
This is all to say that as my daughter turns one, I am no longer in the torturous hellscape of wee babydom, and in fact, my day-to-day with this precious creature is simply happy, but I have no fucking idea what I’m doing, either with my own life or my child’s.
