Excuse me, have you seen my marbles?

      Earlier this week, a gentleman who works in my office returned to work from taking time off for the birth of his first child. He bounded into the office early one morning with a spring in his step, a smile on his face and looked as refreshed and invigorated as one who had just returned from a six week stay at an all-inclusive resort and spa for new fathers.  I thought he had to have been lying about what he had actually been doing for the past month and a half. There couldn't have been a baby…he looked so well rested…

     Then he did the new father thing, whipped out his iPhone and started showing the myriad of pictures all new proud fathers take. “So, what’s his name?” I asked the newest member of the office’s paternity of fatherly brotherhood.

“Her..”

“His name is Her?”

“No, it’s a girl.”

Of course it was. There just wasn't any hair. I was so used to my daughter’s Rapunzel-esque volume of hair that it was an alien thought that any poor female child be born bald, so it must have been a boy, a boy no doubt foreshadowing his future, unfortunate hair loss. The uncomfortable moment between us passed quickly, although I did realize that I was probably the newest ostracized member of the office’s paternity of fatherly brotherhood. He continued swiping through the pictures on his phone and something rather odd struck me (other than the fact that I STILL thought the baby looked like a boy in a teeny, tiny dress). In nearly every single picture, which constituted the first six weeks of that baby’s life, the child was asleep. Asleep and looking like a bald-headed little angel.  

     In one of those “life flashing before your eyes” moments that usually only happen on bad television shows or to people on drugs, I was taken back to when my daughter was born and forced to recall my own experience. My wife went into labor on a Tuesday at about 11:30 at night, and that baby didn't get here until Thursday at about 4pm. We didn't actually go to the hospital until Thursday morning at about 8, which means we woke up on Tuesday September 20 thinking it would be a day like any other, and then we wouldn't go to sleep again until sometime in the second week of October while my mom was visiting and then only after I wheeled my wide eyed infant daughter out in her bassinet and yelled something to the effect of, “You’re watching the baby tonight”, although I’m quite sure it actually sounded more like, “Bwahhlrrggsa AAAAHHHHHH.”

     The day my daughter was born, I didn’t really feel the fact that I had been awake for two solid days, but then the following two nights in the hospital started to wear on me. A screaming newborn who hates the world because she has been unwillingly forced into it coupled with perfectly timed visits every fifteen minutes from nurses who are completely oblivious to the fact that the thing most needed by new parents is sleep does not make for an ideal way to get any kind of rest. And it all went downhill from there. By the time we got home with our newborn daughter, she had decided that she was so mad at the world that she would do everything in her power to bring it to its knees and wouldn't sleep a wink until she had had her vengeance. The two weeks I had taken off from work began as a time of family bonding and turned into a 336 hour marathon of insanity. There were nightly instances of me rocking like a madman with my daughter swaddled like a tiny mummy while she peered up at me with eyes full of fire and hate as I tried to put her to sleep at 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 5 in the morning. She and I once went for a drive at 1:30 in the morning because I got the foolish idea that the vibration from the car might lull her to sleep… a foolish idea, indeed. She would never take a pacifier, so one night I tried to tape the pacifier to her face so she might actually be pacified. All she did was scream and wish death upon me. At one point, I actually considered the idea that she might be possessed.

     As the weeks dragged on, sleep was becoming nothing more than a distant memory.  Day after day after day without sleep combined with the stress of trying to figure out why my daughter wanted to torture me made my mind deteriorate to the point of delirium and hallucinations. Every sound I heard: a passing car, a squeaking door, a faucet turning on, a cat’s meow, in my head sounded like a screaming baby. I would shudder at the screaming baby driving past me on the street, grate my teeth at the screaming baby hidden inside the telephone, gaze in utter befuddlement at the fat, gray cat who was screaming at me like a baby. I was snapping, losing touch with reality. Then I had to go back to work. I feigned comprehension when my coworkers would talk to me, because in my new reality, everyone either sounded like a screaming baby or Charlie Brown’s teacher.  I would stare at the computer for hours on end and watch the letters swirl around my face in a flashing vortex of confusion. I remember seeing myself from across the room and the me who wasn't me was pointing and laughing at me. I had come undone.

     So, to have such a cheerful, well rested new father show me pictures of his sleeping baby threw me for a bit of a loop and made me momentarily relive that which I had tried so hard to purge from my memory. I’m past all that now and facing new and bigger challenges.