It’s 11:36 at night. You are carrying your sleeping 2-year-old down the street, and it is one of the best things you’ve ever done.
True, you are just a little buzzed and, at this hour, prone to sweeping sentimental statements. To be honest, you hate a not insignifcant amount of this situation.
That it’s a Saturday night and it feels like you are well past your bedtime. There’s the ever-present ticking of the clock, and how you know the later you stay up the less sleep you get, because this delightful bundle of warmth and joy and pee-in-his-pajamas is gonna start singing Raffi songs and “happy birthday” to himself at 6:23 a.m no matter when he or you went to sleep. No matter what you do, you will be under-rested. And now, by the time you are home and ready for bed, you will have to choose what to cut from your list of bedtime joys: your ten minutes of Duolingo, fifteen pages of your next book club pick (meeting on Wednesday, so it should be thirty), maybe fifteen minutes of one of the twelve shows you’re in the middle of streaming.
A part of you wishes that if you are under-rested that it would be because you were up late working, and then another part of you hates that that’s what you’re thinking about after a wonderful night of socializing with other adults. You are forgetting already the joy of two stolen hours around a fire with some drinks and banter, forgetting so quickly that it’s exactly what you long for in this parental life of diminished free time. All of this swims around in your head while you smell his almost-clean shampoo scent and he rubs his little nose against you, and you know he feels safe in your arms, weightless, at home. You have had a lot of love in your life but you never knew you could be that for someone.
When your wife was about 10 weeks pregnant you ran into your friend from middle school, who told you you just HAD to have kids. And even though you were on that path already, however tentatively, your stomach twisted around itself. You smiled, trying not to show it, nodded dumbly. What luck, you would think later, after the brief, initial flash of anger. How fortunate to think that having kids was a simple matter of choice. Of deciding. Like going out for a night of drinking. You do or you don’t. There is no trying.
You forgave him long ago, just like you forgave the people who claim that having kids is the best thing you could ever do, and all those who claim it is the worst thing you could ever do. In a world of false dichotomies, a black-or-white world that fights against nuance, this is yet another senseless battle waged against the wonders of the gray spectrum. A million thinkpieces that insist you are either on one side or the other. Blessed or cursed, that’s it. As if you can’t be both at once, as if blesses and curses don’t know how to don disguises, as if they do not contain multitudes. As if we don’t come to resent our benedictions, or learn to find joy in our nadirs. As a society that constantly craves more, we have a strange resistance to the concept of and.
It is strange to think that this two-block walk home with thirty pounds of sleep could exist in anything but grayscale. Especially when it could have never happened, so easily. You resented others their luck, and yet you have been so lucky. “And yet” is not a negation. It is an addition.
There is another world where you are walking home at 11:36 at night carrying nothing, and you’re thinking that it’s the best possible feeling to be so unencumbered. Perhaps just another hand in yours. Maybe, in another world, your sweeping sentimental thoughts are all you have for company, if we are exploring all possible worlds. You forget, when you consider other worlds, that they are also not black or white. You forget those worlds, while full of imagined joy, would also carry the weight of having missed this life. It hardly matters what universe you’re in or what good fortunes you find ourselves with. You’ll forget them.
In this universe, you’re begging your good fortunes to please whisper in the morning so that Mama can sleep in, which gives them the idea to call out for her and barge into the room, and then you try to redirect their attention it turns to screaming louder than any non-whispering could have been, so of course you forget. When you’re calling insurance again, figuring out if the long list of fertility medications have been approved, or if they’ve been approved by the wrong specialty pharmacy again, you of course forget to be enchanted. How could you find joy in these moments? What person can maintain the sweeping sentimentality when it is not 11:36 on a Saturday night? When they don’t sink into you like you are home and instead are demanding milkshakes for dinner or trying to yank toys out of younger kids’ hands at the park screaming “mine!” as if they don’t know what a damn cliche it is.
Finding charm in the minutiae of parenthood is not unique to those who have struggled with fertility, nor are you immune to forgetting the charm when your unlikely child lays down on the grocery store floor, holding himself hostage until certain unintelligble demands are met. In this sense it is the miracle of life exactly like all others; just because it is miraculous does not preclude it from the occasional bad mood, from getting bogged down by the every day. Parenthood or not, vitamin supplements and progesterone shots notwithstanding, forgetting life’s charms is the human condition.
Until it isn’t. Until somehow, the less than ideal circumstances that could be pointed at in any universe seem to fall away, and the only thing that remains is the And. You are tired and undersocialized and prone to sentimentality and carrying that thirty-pound, 6:23-a.m.-waking “I don’t want to”-repeating semi-bully is one of the greatest things you’ve ever done.