—
Ross and I waded back into the fatigue and sleeplessness of parenting a newborn like walking into a freezing surf, but this time I made sure to stay on my antidepressant and to reflect often, and with gratitude, on the single biggest lesson I’d learned from Sam: babies are remarkably resilient, and I’d already made it through twenty months of raising one without accidentally killing him. We also had help again—my mom stayed on for the first week of Wes’s life, and several of the wives signed up to bring us home-cooked dinners in the weeks immediately following the birth. To someone constantly preoccupied with the fear that her social awkwardness and imperfections, once discovered, will permanently exile her from the tribe, this simple act of kindness was stunning and humbling. I remember every single meal and was often struggling not to cry in accepting them. It’s a kindness I now take every opportunity to pass on.
Months passed in a kind of cloistered, affectionate exhaustion. I counted the days successful if I could grab a fifteen-minute nap, and the weeks equally so if I managed to shower at least three times. Still, the exhaustion remained only that: exhaustion. I thought about deep, uninterrupted sleep with a covetousness that was outright lustful, but there were no dark, unshakable thoughts about my being an utter failure as a human being, no sudden flashes of rage, and no random bouts of weeping and self-maiming behind the furniture. I counted myself lucky and tried to become worthy of this relative clarity of mind by remembering to write down snippets of how our early days together unfolded, hoping that I could grab and record a few things to tell the boys when they were older.
Sam was a doting and carefully observant older brother. He practiced his own parenting skills on a stuffed doll he dragged around by the hair and called Baby, often sitting down cross-legged next to wherever I sat cradling Wes, and holding Baby up to his bared chest to nurse. He was wide-eyed and quiet through Wes’s early crying spells and took to simultaneously embracing, bouncing, and patting a variety of toys, including plastic tractors and tiny animal figurines, while saying, “Oh, oh, oh . . . ssh, ssh . . . s’okay . . .” For such an intensely energetic toddler, this change was totally unexpected.
Parenting two kids close in age was a weird mental juggling act where I switched constantly between trying to remember all the old newborn routines and milestones while simultaneously trying to anticipate the entirely new terrain of toddlerhood. It felt like speaking two languages at once. I stumbled across a few moments that were so layered with meaning for me that it became difficult for me to separate out the objective experience of what happened from my own stunned emotional response. An example: When Sam first learned to say “I love you,” he would say it only as he ran away, slammed a door, or hid his face behind a wall, a chair, or the opaque, pebbly glass of the shower stall. This was almost always accompanied by peals of laughter, and when I realized that he was using the words as a teasing substitute for “good-bye,” and that he did this because it was always the last thing Ross said to him before he walked out the door for work, and the last thing I said before I walked out of his room at night, I was at first speechless and stunned. Then I resolved to smudge the association between “I love you” and absence by saying it all the damned time. Good morning, I love you! Here’s a sandwich and I love you! I love you, and you should put that down!