Spain Dad, a baby blog

Totem Pole Vancouver, originally uploaded by Kevin Grahame.

I stirred awake to the sound of Alleke sobbing from her bedroom. “Daddy,” she screamed, trying to escape a bad dream.

I opened my eyes. I was sitting in the rocking chair in the living room, blanketed by shadows, with Teo asleep in my arms.

I struggled out of the chair like a pregnant woman and felt my way through the apartment to our bedroom where April was napping between feedings during the graveyard shift. I wanted her to sleep, so I reached across the bed and turned off the red light on the baby monitor. The speaker went dead, and the tormented ramblings of Alleke untangling herself from a bad dream shifted next door where I found her sitting up in bed and blubbering nonsense like someone who had just witnessed something so horrible they could no longer get their words straight. I closed the door behind me, and with Toe in one arm, I ran my finger through Alleke’s silvery hair, and I said, “Alleke, I’m here.”

As if released from a spell, she lay down in bed, still whimpering, and I pulled the covers up over her shoulders. I sat on the edge of the futon on the far side of her room and sang lullabies to my children. When Alleke was fast asleep, I sat down in the rocking chair in the living room again and fell asleep until the alarm on my mobile phone woke up me up. It was time to get Alleke ready for school.

Later that morning after I had dropped Alleke off at school, I made a pot of tea, and April and I sat on the couch while Teo napped on April’s lap, and we talked—for the first time since Teo had been born a week earlier.

“How are you?” April asked.

I smirked. “You know better than to ask that question,” I said. It seemed almost cruel to ask the question when we had a newborn in the house, like asking a college student in the middle of final exams how he was doing. It was better not even to ask, but simply to push through.

I entertained the question, however, and then I said something that seemed entirely random.

“I’m at the bottom of the totem pole, aren’t I?” I asked.

April smiled gracefully and thought for a moment, and then said, “Yeah, you are.”

“You’re definitely the busiest person in our family right now, but I’m the last priority,” I continued. “I take care of you and I take care of the kids, and you take care of you and you take care of the kids, and that’s the way it should be, but it means I don’t make the list right now.”

April smiled an apology, which didn’t help me as much as it did to simply put into words how I was feeling about being the dad of a newborn again. I really don’t know why we as adults want to have kids when in the end what it really amounts to is giving away our rights and our time and our resources and our ambitions to take care of someone else. We give away our freedom to be someone else’s servant, but somehow in the end when we ring it all up at the till, it’s priceless, and we would fight to the death for the experience to raise our children.

CONTINUE READING THIS STORY: “I think we need to hire someone to clean the house,” April said as she stood in the middle of the living room…