A Lesson In Faith

A few days after Corey and Kellam had their baby, Corey sent me an email. “I’ve never felt so whole,” he wrote, “...or alive.” Corey is kind of adorable, kind of sentimental, and very much prone to obsess over a new project. The baby, and fatherhood, were clearly the new projects.

I am prone to constant self-assessment, a little bit of competitiveness, and sometimes, I’m not proud to say, judging others. I’ve confessed here before that Quinn was three months old before I decided I was ready to feel glad to have her in my life. It was far from instantaneous for me, and even farther for Sam, though I should probably let him speak for himself. And, in those early days of Corey’s new fatherhood, when I was receiving pictures of the sleeping newborn hourly, I experienced some sort of weird jealousy that I didn’t have a partner who enjoyed our baby like Corey enjoyed his. Every new photo that popped into my inbox caused me to locate Sam in the crosshairs of my criticism. What’s wrong with him, I wondered. Why wasn’t he like this when Quinn was born? Why isn’t he like this even now? And how did I end up married to the Tin Man?

The reality, of course, is that if Sam had been as effusive about baby love in those first couple of months, when I felt like a sleepless alien in my own body, I probably would’ve handed him the kid, wished him luck and been on my way. Sam and I are, for better and for worse, well matched. And I realized that, fortunately, before I did too much damage comparing him to my old friend.

Winter is challenging for us, so we’re not always focused on the positive. Near constant school responsibilities, lots of tag-team parenting, the stress of our road in winter, etc...all of them conspire against clear-headedness. On top of that, Quinn seems determined never to sleep through the night without eventually ending up in our bed sometime before dawn. An almost daily discussion in the months leading up to this time, was about how to keep Quinn in her own bed so we could get a good night’s sleep. For a while, after she transitioned from her crib to her bed, she would wake up and still call out to us from her room. But this winter we entered a new phase: little feet pad across the wood floor in the dark, a quiet “Mama!” is whispered in my ear, and she lifts up the blanket to climb in and snuggle and fall back to sleep. Now we don’t even have the opportunity to try to convince her to stay in her own bed; she just comes in and helps herself to ours. For me, that’s not so bad because the truth is I love having her curl up next to me, and now I don’t even need to get up to go get her. When Quinn is snuggling with me, warm and soft and breathing in my ear, I’ll tell you what: I feel whole, and alive. 

Sam doesn’t love sharing the bed as much as I do (or at all), and when he complains, I remind him: it won’t last forever. I intend to enjoy it as long as possible, whether he intends to or not.

A couple of weeks after Corey’s baby was born, with the baby-daddy envy finally beginning to subside, Sam and I managed to get Quinn to bed one night and still have some energy to watch a movie. We had some dinner, a glass of wine, and watched James Gandolfini and Julia Louise Dreyfus in the movie Enough Said. It’s a great film, about two divorced adults, each with a daughter about to go off to college. In an early scene, Dreyfus’s character is in bed early in the morning, and her college-aged daughter comes into the room and climbs in bed with her to snuggle. I looked over at Sam guiltily, wondering if he was thinking what I was: it actually might last forever!  As you can imagine, we each responded differently to that scene. 

The movie progressed and the daughter’s departure for college, thousands of miles away, loomed closer and closer. Already I dread Quinn going off to school and I still have fifteen years to prepare. I have essentially given up on the hope of Sam understanding this, given up on the idea that we will have shared feelings that will allow us to commiserate. When the scene finally came, and Dreyfus took her daughter to the airport and had to say goodbye outside the gate, I was toast. Tears poured down my cheeks. Snot streamed from my nose. I couldn’t hold it in. I was no longer watching a movie--I was traveling through time, standing in the airport myself, and a grown Quinn, just out of reach, was smiling and waving goodbye. 

Just when I thought I would die of anticipatory sadness, I glanced over at Sam again. 
Tears streamed down his face too. My world was, and is, as it is meant to be.