Sleep Regression

On six months of Lucy

“Just hang out with Dumbo,” the nurse says, “They’ll come get you soon.”

I’m sitting in an entirely beige hallway, empty save for the chair I’ve just been herded into and the small, framed picture of Dumbo on the wall across from me.

My wife, your mom, is on the other side of a few doors. You’re there too, but I don’t think of you in those terms yet. You’re the baby. You’re part of your mom but maybe you’re also an idea? It’s unclear, we’ve had a lot of other stuff on our minds. We have just moments to figure it out.

I feel a little ridiculous, covered in head to toe sterile hospital garb while staring at Dumbo. I look at little like the guys from Breaking Bad, a show I will probably mention to you at some point that will be as old to you as Beverly Hillbillies was when my dad used to mention it to me. I don’t know it yet, but I’ve just been placed in time, a 34 year gap between myself and you, whose line extends far into the future. This feeling of displacement and ineptitude that floods me as I stare at Dumbo will become common. Maybe that’s why Dumbo is there.

In two months, I’ll schlep you, a still-recovering wife, and the world’s most confused cat through a ten hour travel day that takes us to go live in Chicago.

In three months, I’ll be a full time dad. I’ll scramble to mix bottles in parking lots and figure out how changing tables work. In five months, I’ll realize that changing tables are just tables that fold out from the wall, I’ll have finally figured it all out. In six, you’ll forget how to sleep and send me back to square one. I’ll never feel like I know anything again. Maybe I was Dumbo.

But in a few minutes, I’ll see my wife lying on one side of an obscuring curtain, with the smile of a bisected magician’s assistant, as if to ask “How’s the trick going?” What she’s done up until this point is magic to me and what she’ll do next even more so.

She’ll ask what’s happening on the other side and I’ll tell her that a gentleman never looks at his wife’s exposed internal organs. Then suddenly, I’ll hear you. You’ll be crying, in the room with us though you’ll have been there all along. They’ll raise you high, surgical lights below you so bright that it seems like you’ve been pulled screaming from the void. You’re an arrow loose on the wind. We’re in it now.

They’ll bring me over to cut the cord. I wasn’t sure I wanted to cut the cord. I’d been worried that maybe it would be odd to have my first interaction with you cause you pain. The nurse will tell me that the cord is “just like hair” and rather than go with my gut and say “please elaborate on that” I’ll cut it. Ah well, I’ll think, if it’s hair...

I’ll hold you. I knew you first as muscle and bone on a screen but now you’re Lucy and you’ve always been Lucy and you’ve always been in my arms. I’d resented the trite way that other parents had recounted it to me. Everything changes. It’s perfect. The best day of your life. Then I’d spend the next few months trying to do the same and cursing under my breath as I repeated the lines verbatim. Turns out, trite things rule. Few of us are so unique as to break ground on a new type of good thing. All of our best routes to happiness are well worn paths in grass. I won’t manage to invent a new way to describe it. Everything changed. It was perfect. The best day of my life.

Still holding you, I’ll turn around to tell your mom that you’ve arrived and as I turn, I’ll see what seems to be every single one of her organs on the operating table, laid out like tools. A gentleman never tells.

In less than a week, I’ll have been covered in so many different instances of baby poop that it no longer bothers me.

In fifteen more, I’ll hear your first laugh. It will be a maniacal, joyful thing that throws me across the room like a rag doll.

Every day from June 20th onward, I will wonder how I could ever possibly explain to you what this feels like. For all those true, trite things parents say, none of them manage to explain where the love comes from. I thought it would hit me like a truck, that a beam of light would envelope me and my eyes would fully dilate, changing me forever. But it was different, like filling in a blank, like editing time.

In four months, I’ll watch your little hands grasping at the air. I’ll see them briefly bump into each other and watch as your eyes widen. They’re both mine, you seem to think, clasping the two hands together like an athlete congratulating herself, These are part of me and they’ve been here all along. I’ll laugh for a moment. “Yeah,” I’ll say, “It’s kind of like that.”

But for now, it’s me and Dumbo. Dumbo and I. A nurse opens a door, not even the door I thought I was supposed to be paying attention to, and flags me down.

“You can come in,” she says, “She’s ready for you.”

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Hey gang, hope you’ve all had a good latter half of your 2025. I , as the above would tell you, have been pretty busy. As it turns out, the first handful of months of parenting are pretty intense. I hadn’t been told!

But, this newsletter isn’t going anywhere, though my goals to continue posting multi-part series on any sort of schedule may have proven a little premature for somebody whose first kid is still under a year old.

I plan to return in the new year with the express focus of this newsletter for the foreseeable future being on talking about real, tangible, ways my readers can build a life offline (as well as reminders of why doing so is increasingly important.)