Meeting Jolene

NOTE: This piece was originally published on 2.18.16.

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Our daughter Jolene was born during a heat wave in early September 2015.

Being in the delivery room during her birth was the single most remarkable event in my life thus far. There was simply nothing in my life beforehand that I could point to as an analogy. But in many ways, it was a totally accurate experience of every parenting cliche.

A baby changes everything.

They grow up so fast!

You’ll be amazed what you can accomplish without sleep…

What friends and family with children *don’t* tell you is that having a baby completely demolishes your sense of self. Whatever identity you’ve built up in the years prior to that moment, by the time you leave the hospital, you’re leaving it behind along with the wilting flowers and empty juice boxes.

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In the two days that followed Jolene’s birth, our entire lives collapsed into a 10 x 10 hospital room. Time sped up and slowed at random. A 20-minute nap felt like eons had passed, while dinner orders were taken right as we finished breakfast.

Despite the best intentions of nurses, social workers, and relatives to “get some rest,” we were never alone for more than an hour. The manners and social graces I’d been raised with quickly vanished, too. I was reduced to the most essential of human interactions. No pleasantries, no humor, no polite inquiry into the other person’s life. This was all business: “Yes, the baby pooped this morning. No, we don’t need any juice. Don’t shake the baby; got it.”

As we decamped from our hospital room and tucked Jolene into her car seat for the very first time, I certainly felt the hypnotic effects of sleep deprivation and the Titanic weight of responsibility. But I also felt a clarity, an opening, a replenishing. Like the way a hole dug in the sand will fill with water from the bottom, I felt like I was being remade in preparation for this new stage of life. My capacity to experience the world and to love the world and to fear the world blossomed.

I was definitely no longer me. But that was starting to feel more OK.

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There’s a common saying that women become mothers the moment they find out they are pregnant. Men, in contrast, don’t begin fatherhood until they meet their offspring.

If this is true, then my wife had a nine-month head start learning how to be a parent. I started this whole “fatherhood” thing already lagging behind. So I’ve become used to feeling just shy of prepared and falling short of total confidence.

Vaulting that chasm — reconciling the man I was and the dad I wanted to become — has always been a source of worry and anxiety. I’m a very methodical person. I like lists, order, efficiency. As soon as we found out we were having a baby, I dived into Bookland. I dutifully partitioned out chapters of parenting books each evening, and gorged on them when I had free time.

I erroneously thought that, beneath the immensity of all, parenting had a secret code that could be cracked. If I could just do enough research and advance prep, I could tackle fatherhood head-on.

I was wrong.

Giving up the promise of control is hard for me. Some days it’s easier to accept the ambiguity, the very real fact that my failures as a dad are inevitable. I will let people down. I will cancel plans. I will disappoint friends. I will do things, in my worst and smallest moments, that my daughter and my wife may fear.

But rather than letting the anxiety paralyze me, I’m trying to let it liberate me. I no longer have to hold myself to the old standards. I can choose for myself and others unlimited compassion and forgiveness. I don’t have to walk in fear anymore of a committing a social faux pas or presenting myself in a way that someone may disprove. I will fail, I will fail often, and I will continue to try my best each new day.

I’m learning, with great relief, that the people who matter most in my life accept that this is part of the journey of being a parent. Many of them have been down this road themselves. The others have hearts and minds big enough to embrace this new, more complicated version of myself. The unpredictable, and at times unavailable, slowly changing me.

Their perspectives are essential in helping me decide which pieces of the egg make sense in my life and which ones I’ve outgrown. I don’t know what the new egg will look like. I may not like it at the moment. I may fear it. But however it turns out, it will always still be me.

And that’s one of the greatest gifts Jolene has given me in her 5 months of life. The ability to love myself more fully, to cherish all the pieces of me — those made and those yet unmade.