This post was initially titled, “Four Months as a Dad”, which should tell you everything you need to know about how being a dad is going for me.
A few years ago I had a passing interest in how memory works. I was juggling new programming languages, all the maths, and cramming for exams. Any approach to increase my context window by a few more tokens was greatly appreciated. In my search, I read Moonwalking with Einstein where Joshua Foer posits this concept akin to memory density.
The idea being in your youth, the days are just packed with newness. Time seems to slow; you are wading through the richness of life (and with a baby, it’s very messy richness). As you age, you get routines. You see the same day pass you by without giving it any pause. You speed through life; time slipping through your fingers.
Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. ….. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.
Having a baby drops the speed back down to a crawl. A week is a month, a month is a year. That day I skipped my morning run? Turns out I haven’t been running for weeks.
For most of my life, I’ve had a tendency to lose track of time. Spending so long on repeat that there’s no telling when you started or when you plan on ending. That thing you think happened two weeks ago was closer to four months.
When I went back to work, the first thing I would do after work was take Daphne on a cold rainy walk. Her in our Baby Borne, me in a rain jacket carrying an umbrella for the first time in my life while listening to an audio book.
It’s surreal to transition from those months. Recalling the nights sleeping on the floor in her nursery, trying to claw back some sense of normalacy in our lives by moving her from the side of our bed into her own room. It’s even more surreal to realize that we are still years away from a real conversation with her her. If six months feels like six years, what does three years look like?
I have this weird sense of feeling more engaged and productive than any other moment in my life while simultaneously drowning in things to do that will never get done. Some days I feel wired from the pace of activity, enjoying the frenetic energy of it all. Other days I’m strung out, wondering if it’s normal to fall asleep at 8pm.
I’ve stopped the daily doom-scrolling of current events (it seems just in time). No more regular trips to catch up on sports dramas on ESPN or The Ringer (my ultimate vices). The weekends where I would binge watch a TV show or go on two-hour long runs are gone. There’s no time for all the luxuries.
I miss some of those things (mostly the runs), but all those moments were already slipping through my fingers. They were thin, watery moments. The last six months are awash with memories I hope to hold on to for the rest of my life.
This is what raising a child has felt like. A combination of surreal, beautiful, and messy. And the tiny little human responsible for it all is now six months old. She goes to daycare 4 days a week, began trying solids, and got her first cold (which she promptly gave to my wife and I). As a certifiable “big girl,” she’s seconds away from critiquing my next joke.
Like these last six months, I want to make those seconds feel like a lifetime.