When you're a dad, no one cares

My first born was a colicky baby. For the first three months of life, he cried from about 8 P.M. until about 2 A.M. every night. There were very few things that would calm him down. Sometimes I would put him in his car seat, lean forward, and swing the 20 pound contraption back and forth between my legs. And that would usually get him to stop crying, but you can only swing a car seat between your legs for so long before you: A) Tip over B) Hit yourself too many times in the leg or C) break your back. Needless to say, those early months were tough. And we were exhausted. I remember showing up at my in laws one night at about 3 A.M. The baby was crying and my wife and I were both crying. I don't think we said a word. We just handed him over and headed down to their basement to sleep and let them deal with him.

Sometime during those early months I got a cold. That terrible kind of cold where your head hurts and your body hurts and your face feels like it it stuffed with ferrets. And one night, as I was swinging the car seat between my knees to the dulcet tones of a screaming newborn, I remember thinking to myself that all I wanted in the world was to curl up in my own bed and go to sleep. And then, very clearly, a thought popped into my head. "It doesn't matter," said the thought, "You're the dad now. What you want is totally irrelevant. This baby could cry for the next 36 hours straight and you would still just have to stand here and swing this baby seat." And that was the moment that I knew that I was a Dad.

Isn't that what Parenthood is all about? All of your hopes and dreams and desires and wants all get swallowed up in the needs and wants of your children? And you do it (mostly) willingly, because you want them to be happy and safe and successful. That's why for the last two nights in a row when I have gotten home from work I set my bag down and played a rousing game of Monopoly: Disney Chanel edition. Not because I want to. I'm tired. And crabby. And hungry. And I have lots of important FB checking and Buzzfeed reading to do. But my daughter says "Please?!" in a really cute voice and suddenly I find myself laying on the floor, my dinner uneaten, paying her $4 because I landed on "The Suite Life of Zack and Cody" and she owns it. (For the record, I have lost both games. But at least I get to be Zach Efron, and imagine that I have his hair.) It's why my days off are usually spent going to the park, or somebody's baseball game, or to McDonald's for lunch so the kids can play on the play land.

Someday my kids will be grown and I'll be awesome again. And I'll sleep in when I am sick and take naps on Sunday. I'll go to movies on weeknights and won't have to pay someone to sit in my house while my kids sleep. I'll cook amazing meals with weird ingredients, and I won't spend any grocery money on any food shaped like an animal. And my bed won't be full of Frosted Flake crumbs (which, by the way, essentially feel like laying on broken glass.)

But it will probably be kind of sad, too. Because I do, indeed, like McDonald's french fries and it's kind of nice to just get to keep refilling my Diet Coke and reading my kindle while my kids play. And it's pretty cute that my daughter wants to hang out with me and play Monopoly, even if am tired. Even if I do lose.

Being Dad.

So there are moments, every day or rather, they can come on any day, where your mind snaps a picture and you remember that moment and it shapes you.

Our best friends lived right across the street from us in Jersey City, New Jersey.  They had a daughter and we did not have any kids.  We had always thought we would have kids, but we knew we needed to adopt and we really didn't know all that meant so we just kept on not having kids.

One night, I was sitting in our bedroom that looked out onto the street which our friends lived on and I noticed them parking their car.  It was summer but it was late and getting dark and I have this clear picture of my friend, a dad, climbing out of the driver's side and opening the back door and unhooking his sleeping daughter from her car seat, her flopping into his arms and then tucking in.  He wrapped her blanket around her and my mind took a picture.  That was what I wanted.  All of it.  This quite moment where no other labels stick to you, only 'Dad'.

Later, we got our daughter, and she was perfect (is), and here's the thing, people who wonder if you can really love a child who came from somewhere else, or rather someone else, as much as biological child, well, they forget the father. You see, no father has ever carried a baby inside his belly. In fact, when he contributed to that baby, his mind was most likely elsewhere. His bonding begins when they meet face to face.  No child, who was raised by two parents thought, 'You know, my mom just sorta loves me more...I guess it was those nine pre-birth months that really tipped the scale.'  No one questions the fathers ability to bond and love and protect a baby he didn't carry. And so it was with my daughter.  But another secret they don't tell you, is that it doesn't happen that first second. You think maybe it should but in that moment you are still meeting a stranger and nothing is stranger than a new born. This is also complicated when adopting as there is one string in the back of your heart that you hold back, you have to. You protect it because the truth is it could all fall apart at any moment.  And if you gave yourself  over, completely and totally gave over every string, you would never recover.

The first time I saw her she was in an incubator getting warmed up.  The delivery had happend very fast and we had just missed it. So we pressed our faces to the nursery glass looking for our baby. While we thought she would be easy to spot, she was not.  We came looking for our black daughter but there were only white ones.  So she came out pink, we didn't know?! But we saw her name and she turned her head and we, all three of us, felt it. (okay, I'm projecting what the 15 min old baby felt, but it's our story and I'm telling it, so you get what you get.) ...she turned her head and we, all three of us, felt it.  But the 'IT' was the surprise, I did not feel that she was my daughter, what a felt was a deep longing, 'Oh...I hope that is her.  I want it to be her. Please, please, let her be mine.'  She was (is).

Raising a new born is like someone giving you a hot water bottle that cries and poops. You don't sleep a lot but you also get to snuggle a lot and rock it a lot and she never wipes off your kisses (three year olds do). And while I felt like a dad at the time, I must not have been.

Once, when she was older, we were driving across the country moving from New Jersey to Utah.  We picked the scenic route as we would never do this drive again, and meandered down the east coast through the Great Smokey Mountains, then through Atlanta on our way to Savannah and through Jacksonville. Drove for days through Texas, where the sky touches the distant ground on every side of you then whipped up to the foothills of Colorado before coming to our new home.  And every night, and my wife would let me cause she knew the story, we would pull into a new hotel, turn off the headlights and I would get out of the drivers side and open the back door and there she slept. Only when I unsnapped her buckle and she tucked her nose into my neck and breathed out into a deeper sleep did every label drip off me, and I was only 'Dad'
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