Early parenthood—specifically, the first three months of child-rearing—is an extended sleep-deprivation experiment. Everybody who has had a child knows this, and before you have your baby, most parents will warn you about it. But it can’t be overstated. If you’re lucky, you’ll just walk around with a thousand-yard stare. If you’re the proud parent of a colicky child, you may be privy to visions of the white buffalo. Quite honestly, I’m not tremendously qualified to write this article because after the birth of our daughter, Frances, I have a sketchy memory of the whole experience.
Of course the reward of sacrificing delicious, easy sleep has been precious time spent with my daughter. Crawling out of bed to try to get her to fall back asleep at two in the morning was a sacred time for me. As the moonlight poured through the window, I held her tiny, warm body against my chest, and felt connected to something close to divine.
But in the interest of full disclosure, that moonlit scenario only happened twice. I subsequently learned to feign heavy sleep while my wife lurched out of bed to comfort our squalling child. From what she tells me, the moments were less sublime than my happy recollections.
All the wonderful things aside, the dirty little secret about having a baby is that it can be more than a little trying on your relationship with your spouse. But how could it be easy? For two years of dating and five years of marriage before baby, my wife and I spent a year travelling together, caught movies when they first came out, and could leave town on a moment’s notice. Sometimes, we didn’t do anything for hours on end, by choice. We both had the freedom to throw ourselves into our work and play. I ran a marathon and started going to school at night; Hannah started a company. We had an affectionate, well-exercised dog.
Enter one darling daughter and everything has changed. Frances was born in December and doctors told us not to take her to public places for the first few months for fear of illness. We changed our schedules so our entire lives revolved around a creature that weighed less than a good-sized ham—more beautiful of course, but far louder. After the excitement of the birth passed, friends disappeared, family members returned home, and the routine of baby care seemed never to end. The hours of doing nothing but tending to the baby accumulated, and the walls of the house started closing in on both of us. My wife and I began to argue about things like how little I was involved in the whole process. I pleaded work and school. On the days I came home energized and ready to spend time with my wife and daughter, battle-weary wife handed the baby off to me and demanded I take her somewhere, anywhere, even if it was for just a half-hour of relief. We ate meals in shifts and by the time we had some time to ourselves, we’d stare at each other, too tired to do much more than share a couple of stories about our daughter and then fall asleep. I stopped running because I was too tired to get up in the morning before work. Our dog grew fat and sullen.
Although I adored my daughter, there were times when I wanted my old life back. During the first few months, it didn’t seem like relief was in sight. To the outside world, we may have seemed fine, but my wife worried constantly of whether she was going to be a good mother and how she could possibly balance all the things in her life she had managed before Frances, while I felt like Steve McQueen in Papillon after he gets out of solitary confinement—babbling, nervous, and pale. On top of it all, I felt guilty because I knew that, all things considered, we were damn fortunate. Our child was healthy and happy. She wasn’t as good a sleeper as some, but she wasn’t much worse than others. How selfish do you have to be to complain about a baby disrupting your lifestyle?
To say the least, the first few months forced my wife and I to redefine our relationship on a whole new set of terms. And the terms were slightly more favorable than those offered to the Japanese at the end of World War II. You don’t think so? Take away stretches of uninterrupted time with one another, social outlets, travel, good sleep, good meals, and where does that leave you? In prison, without the sex.
In the interest of reclaiming portions of our life back, we did what any old salt of a parent would tell you to do: Get out of the house together without the baby. So my sister-in-law visited us one snowy weekend when Frances was two months old. My wife peeled our daughter off her breast (just to top her off and extend our recess) and we walked out the door to a very forgettable lunch at an Italian restaurant in Green Hills. At the restaurant, Hannah and I challenged each other to talk about something other than the baby, if only for the exercise of it. We mostly stared at the cell phone lying on the table to make sure we didn’t miss a call. A couple of beers and some bad calimari later, we were having the kind of date that doesn’t prompt a follow-up if you’re not married. It was awkward, but at the same time it was kind of nice to be off the clock for a couple of hours.
Thereafter, the dates got a little easier, a little more frequent. We found a babysitter who told us to go out and have fun, and stay out till two in the morning if we wanted to. Sometime around the three-month mark, things suddenly seemed a little more manageable with our lives. We were in a new phase of life because Frances was entering a new phase of her own. And maybe as a reminder for me to take things a little less seriously, my daughter started to belly laugh. If no sleep is bad, belly laughing is very good. Since then, my first priority has become to do whatever it takes to make her sleep or to make her laugh. The latter has proved far easier.
Inevitably, we run into parents who tell us how much they miss those first few months. Sweet, dumb people. They can’t remember how difficult it all was. But I know exactly what they mean. I’ve almost forgotten how difficult it was, too, and I’ve adopted all the trite thoughts that people told me before Frances was born: Your life is never the same after your child is born. There’s nothing quite like having a kid. It’s the most wonderful and challenging thing you could experience. Something like that.
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