This should be a simple post. Joyful. Three sentences, tops:
Hey y'all big news lol we had a baby!! Her name is Emma June. She is a warm loaf of bread with hair. When not eating or pooping, Emma June spends her days sleeping. She is a good baby.
So why can’t I just post that and be done with it? Because I am afraid.
fear #1: i’m a hungry dopamine hippo
Coming of age in the time of social media has inflicted a great deal of psychological trauma upon me and those I love. Nary a birthday goes by without me wondering how many people posted “Happy Birthday!!” on my wall. For a while, that number determined how good of a birthday I’d have. For this and this alone Zuckerberg should be tried before the Hague.
I don’t even use FB anymore! Nor instagram nor twitter though definitely follow me on both xoxo, but still my brain is forever cursed to view any life event, big or small, through a lens of whether that post will ‘do numbers.’ Will it be a banger or a bummer, a viral or a why, al? (didn’t think that’d pan out but it did cuz my name is al tysm).
By this line of thinking, a baby post is a home run. A grand slam. A two eggs, two pancakes, two bacons, two sausages right outta the park.
Knowing this and still posting makes me feel like a clout chasing daddy vlogger who posts a frontfacing camera video to youtube and says "Hey everyone BIG news for the Dobrenko family - WE'RE ADDING A NEW BIRD TO THE FLOCK!! Jayden (the kid's name would be Jayden) is a handful but luckily we've got 14 hands to help (we already have seven children in this vlog family). Will be posting videos for paid subscribers daily to keep everyone up to date on Jayden's gurgles and coos!! LOVE YALL couldn't have had this baby without you. Also huge ty to God love u dude.”
fear #2: it’s an all-caps shift in identity
With our first son Wilder, now almost 3yo, all I could think about for the first month was whether or not he was breathing. I’d check often, putting my finger in front of his nose to feel for air like an idiot detective on CSI: Babies.
Also if you gave the baby water it could kill him. Water! Kill!
And then there was the dark art of swaddling which involves wrapping the baby up in a blanket or sheet like he’s a burrito. The hospital nurses do it so well with the grace and aplomb of a cirque de so les performance and then I try and it feels like I’m suffocating him plus the swaddle falls apart right away its pathetic.
The change from zero to one is that of identity. You become a dad like that (snap) but it takes a couple years for your sense of self to catch up. Whereas for #2, you’re already a dad, so you just become more of one. A double dad.
Leading up to Emma June’s birth, which felt like waiting to get hit by a train in slow motion, Lauren and I talked a lot about how we genuinely forgot what to do with a newborn. What did you do with it all day long? It didn’t help that the female body gaslights the mother by releasing hormones that make her forget all about the pain of childbirth. What are you talking about Janet it wasn’t hard it was fun! you had a fun time let’s do it again.
They’re not sure what happens to the male body probably the same thing they just don’t know yet the science is so tricky to figure out they said.
We hadn’t forgotten though. My body remembered how to change diapers and hold her and everything else besides swaddling that shit is not easy we ended up using the velcro ones those are a sinch. Or a phzzzz.
On the breathing front, Emma June breathes v audibly like a lil warthog so we sorta always know she’s doing it.
All of which to say: there was less fear about whether we were keeping EJ alive, which left a whole lot more time for me to be existentially afraid anxious about things like…
fear #3: i don’t love my baby enough
The first time I wrote this post, I - well, the first time I wrote this post it focused exclusively on an ancient Roman painting motif called a Roman Charity which I can guarantee you is not what you think it is1.
The second first time I wrote about it, I wrote about how I wasn’t sure how I felt about Emma June yet:
I am not over the moon in love with this little ball of dough. I probably will get there in the coming years, if she's cool and likes good music, but definitely not yet.
Now, a few days later, and the situation has changed! I think I might love her?! I don’t know. I’m enamored by her. She’s a little squish and when she lays on me and falls asleep I do indeed feel like I am in heaven. After about 20 min I get antsy and wanna do other stuff but hey, heaven is a place on earth and I never wanna be in any one place on earth for that long my legs get too wiggly.
Everyone’s postpartum experience is different. Some people love their babies while others hate them. Some love the new identity of ‘parent’ while others loathe it. What I can just about guarantee you though is that it won’t feel like it does on Instagram where a mom in a farmhouse with seven blond children posts a photo of herself riding a bareback horse holding her one-day old, smile-laughing like ‘isn’t life great?!"
It isn’t that, and it isn’t all love love love because life isn’t either. It’s all the other stuff too plus the anxiety of worrying that you’re not supposed to feel that other stuff but trust me, you are. It’d be weird (but also fine!) if you didn’t.
in conclusion
Having a baby feels like making a movie and, for a few minutes every week, getting to watch that movie in the theater. The movie itself is so good that you forget you worked on it and instead you get to just sit there and enjoy its profound beauty as you nom on some delicious theater popcorn and unlimited Diet Coke but then you SNAP out of it and remember you’re still making the movie and it’s a low budget indie and the lead actress has just projectile vomited all over you even though she was laying down how could she possibly have done that when she can barely even lift her own head? Because she’s a god damn star, that’s why.
You’ve made this movie once before though. No, you’re still making the other movie, so now you’re making two movies at once that exist in one Extended Universe that is your family. Every once in a while you’ll get to watch the movies in the theater and there’ll be crossovers between the two leads and it’ll be glorious until you have to get back to the set of the first movie because, and this is a direct quote, your almost 3yo lead says he can’t shoot the rest of his sleeping scene because the ‘blanket is touching my butt.’
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Roman Charity which, btw, is a painting motif in which a woman is depicted breastfeeding her jailed father to save him from starving. Wild!
A snippet from that haunted draft below.
And here’s a Curb Your Enthusiasm style painting in which Larry, having complained the whole episode about how he’s gotta drink his daughter’s breast milk (“what, there’s no 2%? She can’t crush up some almonds for me?”), realizes his daughter’s breast milk is actually “pretty, pretty, pretty good.”
I love your radical honesty. Parents feel all kinds of ways about their kids and their babies. And how they feel changes all the time. Here's to normalizing that pretty much all of those feelings are okay.
I can never get over the fact that babies can’t have WATER
I love your radical honesty. Parents feel all kinds of ways about their kids and their babies. And how they feel changes all the time. Here's to normalizing that pretty much all of those feelings are okay.