The 3 a.m. Epiphany

Beloved daughter,

As you know, most of the things I write to you don’t end up on this website. More often, Mom and I pen our reflections in a journal that we will give to you much later in life. Last week I went to log a note about your recent sleep habits, and as I scanned over the previous pages, I noticed that it would be the third entry in a row about your sleep.

Well that is odd, I thought. I mean, sure you sleep a lot, and it’s true that in these first few months, I have spent many hours singing and shushing and dancing you to sleep. But there are so many other worthwhile moments. How come in an entire month—one-sixth of your existence, mind you—I hadn’t tried to put to words your incredible laugh, or where we had gone on family outings, or what clothes you were wearing, or how you smile at your brother, or even just the go-to subject of your amazing cuteness?

As I thought about it, I realized that it’s not just my preoccupation with your sleep that is odd; it’s that I often write these letters at odd hours, when I am at my sleepiest. I began writing this very letter one night at 4 a.m., perched on the edge of the bed waiting for you to finish nursing with Mom before putting you back in your bassinet. (I might have been tied up feeding you myself, but as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, you have an inborn revulsion to the bottle.)

Two of the first five letters I posted to this site were about nighttime interactions I had with your brother, and since he was born, the bulk of my writing ideas have come to me in the quiet, dark, desperately tired moments of the night. What is with that?

Perhaps I am just participating in that long tradition of the writer’s love affair with the nocturnal. Flashes of inspiration are often said to strike in the middle of the night, temporarily immunizing the artist from sleepiness, jolting them awake with the brilliance of an idea. Kerouac couldn’t have punched out On the Road in three weeks without a few short nights.

When I graduated high school, my English teacher gave me a book of creative writing exercises called The 3 A.M. Epiphany, thus titled on the premise that creativity comes knocking in strange ways and at strange times. In music, there is a type of composition all its own called the “nocturne,” a piece that evokes the night. Chopin famously wrote 21 of them; I wonder if he was raising small children at the time.

But here’s the thing: before you and your brother, I never used to be a nighttime writer. Pre-parenthood, I enjoyed my sleep immensely—took it for granted, I now realize. Other than my years in the pressure cooker of college, rarely have I interfered with my sleep in order to write.  There must be more to my fascination with sleep and sleeplessness than a creative impulse.

After all, it isn’t creativity that wakes me up at random hours of the night. It’s you, my needful, fussing, routine-defying, best-laid-plans-be-damned baby. And to be honest, when your cries puncture the still of night like a fire alarm in a symphony, I don’t leap out of bed brimming with inspiration. I flop out, bleary-eyed. I exhale sharply as would a hiker who’s just labored uphill only to arrive at a false summit. Sometimes I mutter something terribly mature and sincere like “Oh great!” or “You gotta be kidding me,” as if my protestations could somehow show you how silly and unreasonable it is for you to be awake. Contrary to the serene Hallmark image of a purring, rosy-cheeked baby nestled into the warm chest of a sweetly smiling daddy, sometimes you end up being rocked back to sleep by a whiny, delirious man more preoccupied with his own rest than yours.

In a twisted way, perhaps that is the reason that I fixate on sleep and sleeplessness, the reason that sometimes I am crazy enough to stay awake to write even after I have won the battle of the wills to get you back to bed: in these moments, rather than feel inspired, I am just the opposite. I am exhausted, depleted, raw. And though such a state isn’t perhaps ideal for artistry, there is nonetheless something profound and compelling about the experience, physically, emotionally, even spiritually.

In one of my favorite recent songs, “The Mother,” Brandi Carlile says of her baby daughter, “The first things that she took from me were selfishness and sleep.” What a perfect line. Right alongside the beautiful love and care and selflessness that parenthood demands is deprivation, sacrifice—indeed an element of suffering.

I’d go one step further: love and this element of suffering are not just side by side but inseparable, necessary even. If you were giggles and cuddles all day every day, any old oaf would be happy to care for you. When your brother was a baby, Mom would somewhat scoff when people commented on “what a good baby” he was, because all they really meant is that he didn’t cause a scene. He was quiet, out of the way; he required little. If he was drooling and screaming and leaking out of his diaper onto their sweater and they still said, “What a good baby,” then I’d start to suspect that they might really, truly love him.

And in that way, whereas I normally am reminded of the Father as I reflect on our life together, when it comes to sleep, I am reminded of the Son. For the picture we have of the Son is of a man totally spent, a man at his most exhausted, his most depleted, at his rawest. We see glorious omnipotent God Himself brought down to clothe himself as an infant among barn animals. We see a man denying himself, leading a life of poverty and homelessness. We see a man with hands weathered by work and face drawn thin with hunger. We see a man washing dirty feet, touching leprous skin, mending crippled limbs. We see a man pacing in the middle of the night, sleep-deprived, lonely, and tortured. In the clearest, most lasting image, we see a man suffering, literally dying for the sake of his beloved.

To meditate on this kind of love is to meditate on suffering. There is no parsing the two. There is no pretending you can accomplish one without the other.

Returning to my pedestrian, itty-bitty lowercase “s” suffering at 3 in the morning, do I think that my sleeplessness is extraordinary? Do I think it is anything nearing the scale of what Christ endured out of love for us? Of course not. Compared to Christ, my suffering is tiny, my love puny. Still, there is something of the same nature in them. A drop of salt water and the ocean are not the same thing, but they are the same stuff.

I suppose that is what keeps me up at night—on one level you, my daughter in need, but on another level nothing less than the stuff of Christ, the lover, the sufferer.

Lest I leave off on a note of utter gloom and lead you to believe that my main experience of parenting is suffering, I should be quick to add that love is not all suffering. If it were, love would hardly be lovely, would it. No one would choose to love; we wouldn’t be drawn to it. Brandi Carlile would stop her song at the loss of self and sleep and never get to lines like “You’re nothing short of magical and beautiful to me.” Parenting would stop at labor and never get to birth.

No, my deprivation, my frustration, my fatigue, my futility—they are mere bits of food stuck in my teeth during a fine meal: annoying in the moment, but forgotten quickly when I think back on the feast.

For with you and your brother, the moments of suffering are far outweighed by moments of laughter and delight, and always followed by tremendous sweetness. No matter the lateness of the hour, I am rewarded, eventually, one way or the other, with that Hallmark scene: a tiny child pressed against my chest or curled up in my arms. In contrast to the tumult of your (and my) fussiness, once you have surrendered to sleep, I get to relish a closeness and quietness, a gentle peace, that only a cared for baby can provide. I’d say that is worth a journal entry or two.

The Gift of Presence

Beloved children,

Today is my last day of paternity leave.

For the past four months, I have preoccupied myself almost exclusively with being a husband, father, and homemaker.

I have done most of the laundry, most of the cleaning, most of the cooking, and all of the grocery shopping. I have learned how to make shallot sauce and breakfast quiche and rhubarb crisp.

I have assembled a hundred Lego towers and read your books shelf to shelf and back again. I have played firefighter and trains and apple orchard.

I have discovered through your eyes the minutest details in our yard, bugs that were invisible from my height, twigs whose significance I never could have guessed. I have picked strawberries I didn’t know we had. I have baked “cakes” made of pinecones and water in a bucket under the Jeep.

I have planned treasure hunts, and feasted at imaginary picnics, and shared in fits of contagious giggles.

I have petted your hair. I have admired your ears, your eyes, your toes. I have worn you on my chest, held you in my arms, carried you on my shoulders, carted you on my back.

I have changed ten thousand diapers and taken ten million photographs. I have exceeded my Google storage.

I have watched you discover one another, first a little boy ecstatic at the long-expected arrival of baby sister, then a little girl wide-eyed with wonder at another small creature like her making funny sounds and constantly buzzing about.

I have bathed you, washed your hands, trimmed your nails, wiped your tears. I have brushed your teeth. I have offered my knuckle to suck on.

I have risen at your waking and sang you to sleep.

I have missed hardly a moment.

Day after day, I have marveled at how small you are yet how heavy you can be, how you fill me with light but exhaust me by bedtime.

Day after day, I have witnessed you do the most magical and the most mundane things, and I have seen how they are often the same.

Day after day, I have led a most ordinary life in a world often no bigger than our living room.

Day after day, I have been blessed with the inestimable gift of presence.

Of course, it’s not like I’m going on an Apollo mission. Just because paternity leave is ending doesn’t mean I will suddenly be absent from your lives. In fact, since I am returning to a job that has gone remote, technically I won’t be going anywhere at all.

Yet our time together will not be quite so singular, not quite so complete in its simplicity. There may be a few more interruptions, a few more sorry, not right now’s, a few more breaks to watch Peppa Pig.

Speaking of Peppa, I feel a bit like you do, son, when one of your cartoon episodes comes to an end. Even when we tell you in advance that it’s almost over, sometimes you can’t help but bawl. You just don’t want it to end. It’s like you feel the full devastation of a good thing coming to a close. I can relate.

We have been working with you on the importance of gratitude in these moments. Rather than whine at what’s lost, we want you to be thankful for what was—and I, too, have so very much to be thankful for in the last four months. This is certainly no moment to whine.

I do sometimes wonder, though, what you would do if we never turned off Peppa, if we let you soak up episode after episode until you had your fill. How long would the streak last? Five episodes? Fifteen? Two hundred? Even when you tired of it, even when you realized it was time to move onto the next thing, I have to imagine there’d still be a piece of you wishing the moment could last forever.

Born in a Pandemic

Beloved daughter,

You were born on the eve of a pandemic. Well, not quite the eve—three days prior, to be precise.

Two months before you were born, I had heard on the radio of a new virus spreading through Wuhan, China. It was half a world away, as innocuous to me as an NPR soundbite. A few people were talking about the virus spreading to the US through Washington State and how we needed to stock up on hand sanitizer and face masks. These lone voices were a small minority and, frankly, they sounded kind of paranoid.

Well, they were right.[1] To spare you the details—and if you really want those, I’m sure you can dig up the many libraries’ worth of news coverage produced in the past few months—I will say that I don’t know anyone who has lived through anything like this before. They call it a once-in-a-century disease. Seemingly everyone on the planet has been touched by it, if not directly, then indirectly thanks to the lockdowns that have driven people stir crazy and sent the economy reeling.

For our family specifically, we have been very slightly affected compared to many, many others. As I write this, Mom and I both still have our jobs. Our health is good. We know very few people who have contracted the disease, and no one who has died from it.

In our daily routines, life is different in odd ways. Mom hasn’t been to a grocery store since before you were born. We haven’t had a friend set foot in our house in months. Your brother has developed an acute shyness toward strangers that we’re not sure to attribute to his stage of development or to the corona spooks. When we do see people, we visit in the front yard or from the safety of our door as they stand awkwardly in the driveway. We play board games and do escape rooms online. Evening walks feel like a game of live-action Pac-Man where everyone’s a ghost. And handshakes and hugs? Quaint, if not bygone customs, it would seem.

For you in particular, the main effect of the pandemic is that you’ve led the life of a hermit. By the time your brother was your age, he had been all over. He had taken photos at your uncle’s crowded Christmas light display, ushered in the new year with friends and family, accompanied me and Mom each week to an ultimate Frisbee match in a busy gymnasium, and road tripped to Colorado to see family. The only public place you’ve visited is a doctor’s office.

But what do you care? After all, your brother didn’t get much from those early experiences. Like you, he was still developing vision beyond a foot or two in front of his face. Fortunately, I suppose, your world is so small right now that being “quarantined” inside a two-bedroom home is as restrictive as a criminal being “imprisoned” in the northern hemisphere: there is still a whole lot to explore.

In the cloistered little life you’ve had so far, what seems significant about the pandemic is not what you have missed in the world, but what the world has missed in you. As people begin to re-emerge like startled turtles from their shells, they are entering a world where you are no longer a newborn, and that is a loss indeed. Virtually everyone, most of our family even, has missed out on that brand new baby magic.

I don’t mean to say you aren’t magic now. You are still way cute, probably cuter now than you were at the start. Now you are doing things like smiling and cooing and laughing—oh, your laughter! If they could bottle that stuff, they could fly rocket ships with it.

But there is something uniquely awesome—not just “neat,” I mean, but worthy of awe—about a newborn, as if the mark of the Creator’s hand is easier to spot. For how little you did in your first weeks of life, it was amazingly hard to look away from you. It was like noticing the details of a flower for the very first time. You were simply exquisite, and insanely fragile, and abounding in lines and contours and shades and expressions that we had never, ever seen. We would stare at you to try to learn your face, this little creature we had glimpsed only in dreams and ultrasounds.

Thanks to COVID, people have also missed out on holding you at your littlest. Again, you still love to be held and I still love to hold you, but it was different in the beginning. For one, your body was crazy small. Eight pounds? Are you kidding me? That’s less than my head, and I carry that thing around all the time.

You had such scarce control over those eight pounds, too. Your limbs moved unpredictably, your eyes wandered aimlessly. You were constantly slumped, a total slave to gravity. Without the steadying of our hands, your body was always making its way down to the next solid surface, like one of those Plinko discs on The Price is Right. You were the very image of helplessness.

If you weren’t crying or eating, you were sleeping, and we gobbled up our chances to have that happen when we were holding you. I swear, there is no pleasure more serene than falling asleep with a newborn dozing on your chest.[2] If virtual reality one day upgrades to Holodeck status, that is the first program I will download.

Everything about you at that age—your warbly cries, your constant fatigue, your insatiable appetite for closeness—it all expressed a sort of trust that is unique to a brand new human: unique, I think, because it was neither conferred nor earned but simply necessary. It was part of your makeup, by design, to need us. What choice did you have but to fall asleep in our arms? Whose else’s arms would you fall asleep in?

Yes, it’s true that you still don’t really have a choice in the matter, but now, larger and more “with it” and, if I’m honest, more humanlike than you were those first few weeks, your radical dependence doesn’t carry quite the same poignancy that it once did. The first hints of independence, albeit subtle, have poked through. You lift your head off the floor; you fix your gaze; you hold onto objects. Your helplessness diminishes day by day.

It’s a development, obvious and inevitable as it is, that makes me both beam and tear up. I am proud to watch you make sense of yourself and this world you’ve been born into, yet sad to say goodbye to that tiny, exquisite, needful girl.

Don’t get me wrong—the pride is nearly continual, the sadness but occasional. Watching you grow is little loss and mostly gain.

There are moments, though, when I wish I could just stop the train, when I wish I could take a photo and jump into the frame to live there forever. But then you would never become the girl, the woman, that you were made to be, and the world would always be stuck in a pandemic, plagued, among many other ailments, by the inability to meet my darling daughter.

It’s not an exchange I’d ever be willing to make. The world has already missed out on too much.



[1] Mostly right. At first, it was reported that the virus entered through Washington, but it was later discovered that, like a thief in the night, it had entered through California some time earlier without detection. This is one among millions of little facts that have been reported ad nauseum, minutia that normally would go unnoticed by the majority of the public but, in this period of heightened anxiety and endless time at home, have been wolfed down like fistfuls of popcorn.

[2] PSA: When you grow up, don’t ever fall asleep like that with your own baby (or anyone else’s, for that matter) unless there is another adult in the room. When Mom or I napped with you, the other one always stayed awake, lest you slid off our chest or our twentyfold weight rolled over on top of you.