Newborns are tough. That’s what everybody says. But everybody can handle some “tough”, right? Having spent the first week with my little girl, my honest thought is that “tough” simply lacks the punch when communicating what a new dad or mom has to face. Had you said “torment“, I would have had a much better mental preparation. Fair enough, I won’t personally describe this experience as torment either, but a penny for your thought, Reuters made a big reveal in 2008 on how Guantanamo subjected one of its prisoners to various tortures including sleep deprivation by moving him “from one cell to another … on average every two hours and 50 minutes but with more frequent moves at night…”. Two hours and 50 minutes, you say…
Sure, one year down the road, I can probably look back and scorn at the feeble-mindedness of my former self. I will have a much better perspective on any past and temporary anguish which simply could not outshine the joy of fatherhood or what mothers have to go through. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? In the heat of the moment, that perspective hardly helps. All I had was the feeling akin to falling off a balcony while sleepwalking, every two hours and 50 minutes. I couldn’t logically comprehend how long that would last or whether things would even improve afterward. For all I knew, that right there would be the next year and a half of my life.
“This too shall pass”, you say. Oh, I believe you, which is all the more reason why I want to document these raw and vulnerable moments before I cross that ethereal “Great Divide”, beyond which I might also qualify myself to discount or invalidate my own experience and say, “Pssh, hundreds of millions of people go through this every year. I don’t know why I made it a big deal.”
At this point, it should be clear that this isn’t an authoritative guide on mastering your new life as a dad. Quite the contrary, this is a landslide clash between the stone-cold reality and a wide-eyed new dad. No hindsight 20/20. No retrospective filtering. Just raw emotions and experience as they come. I would not mind at all if you are entertained at my expense as you read how I squirm through the crevices of new-dad-hood. Having said that, if any part of this journey brings a ray of hope or solace to any fellow new parents that are not from Navy Seal or Iron Man, my heart will be satisfied.
~Du
Photo by Heike Mintel on Unsplash