Tag: Daughters

Lessons from My Toddler

Ten things I’ve learned, or relearned, from my 18-month-old daughter

Illustration by Samantha Harrington

We, as parents, are supposed to teach our kids about the world: what’s good and bad and everything in between. We’re supposed to provide them a structure and framework by which they can begin to understand its complexities and ask questions when they don’t. We’re supposed to help them shape and sharpen their perspective and challenge it when necessary. We’re supposed to be their guides.

But through 18 months of being a dad to Mayla, our strong, hilarious, stubborn little girl, I’ve learned that the opposite is true, too: Our kids can teach us. I’ve learned—or perhaps relearned—things from Mayla that are as or more valuable than anything I’ve taught her. 

So here’s to those timeless lessons of toddlerhood. May we all remember them when life gets crazy.

  1. Take your work seriously.

Recently Mayla has become a chore connoisseur. If you ask her to open the door to let the dogs in, she immediately stops what she’s doing and marches over to it, stretching her arm and standing on her tippy toes to pull the handle. If you hand her a piece of trash and ask her to throw it away, she opens her hand and takes it to the trash can in the kitchen. If you open the dishwasher, she’s suddenly at your side, taking spoons out of the silverware hatch and handing them to you to put in the drawer (which she’d do herself if she were tall enough). If you say it’s time to feed the dogs, she scoops up the dog bowl and heads over to the bin of food in the pantry, waiting expectantly for someone to scoop a cup in. Then she carries over the now-filled bowl to the dogs’ designated eating spots, invariably dropping some (or a lot) of food along the way. When this happens, she immediately sits down and silently picks up every piece of dropped food, one by one, and places it into the dog bowl. It is attention to detail at its finest. 

By far my favorite, though, is laundry. First, she loves to help put the dirty clothes into the machine, taking care not to miss even the smallest sock, helps scoop and pour the detergent, and presses the power button to begin the cycle. Then she goes about her day—until she hears the washer chime to signal the cycle is complete. She immediately drops whatever she’s doing, points over to the laundry room, and exclaims, “Uuahh!” as a giant smile forms on her face. This is our signal that she wants to move the clothes to the dryer, which we then do together. Finally, once all of the clothes are clean and dry (another chime that elicits a joyful scream), she helps us sort and organize all of them as we put them away in our bedroom.

My favorite part about all of this is the look on Mayla’s face when we ask her to do one of these tasks: She looks us directly in the eye, unsmiling, as if to say, Thank you for trusting me. I won’t let you down. To us, they’re relatively menial, quotidian chores; to her, they’re the most important thing she’ll ever do, and she treats them as such. I love that.       

  1. Play. Every day.

Work, as Mayla has established, is important. But so too is play.

Most of Mayla’s non-eating waking hours are spent playing: at the park, on the swing Papa built her in our backyard, in the playroom upstairs. She loves to play with blocks and cars and ramps and balls and bubbles. She loves to play hide-and-seek and chase and (an extremely basic form of) soccer. She loves to play with her Mama and Dada and grandmas and grandpas and aunts and uncles, with anyone who will pick up some blocks and help her make a tower. She loves to play.

Life, as we all know, is busy, and fulfilling your responsibilities as a parent or spouse or employee is of course paramount. But perhaps we should not forget to make time for, every day, something that brings us that simple, pure joy we found every day as kids.

  1. Food is life. Treat it as such.

Since we had such a challenging time feeding Mayla as an infant, we were worried that we might also have trouble when she graduated to solids. We did not.

Mayla loves to eat. Breakfast, second breakfast, lunch, post-nap afternoon snack, pre-dinner stroller snack—these are, probably, her favorite times of the day. It starts in the morning, soon after she wakes up, when she’s strapped into her high chair, wrapped with her bib, and gets to work. She eats eggs or waffles or oatmeal or yogurt (or sometimes several of these at once) and always, always fruit: blueberries and bananas, mostly, but often also strawberries and blackberries and oranges. It is her biggest and best meal of the day. 

The rest of her day is dictated by her eating schedule, and she will, by rapidly moving her bunched fingers toward her mouth, sign language for “eat,” let you know when it is time for her next meal. She’s the queen of snacks—Cheerios and cucumbers and cottage cheese—and loves to feed herself independently. If she likes the food you offer her, which is most of the time, she will sign for more and say, “Muuahh!” so adorably that you will have no choice but to agree to her demands. At some meals she will eat more than her mother. If she doesn’t recognize what’s on her plate, she lets us know, usually by pointing at the unidentified food and saying, “Uuahh?” Only when we have identified it all—“black beans,” “rice,” “avocado”—will she begin eating.

Mayla does not understand all of the hype about fad diets. She does not skip breakfast. She does not believe in intermittent fasting. She is not picky or demanding; if it’s in front of her, she’ll try it, and probably like it. She loves going to the farmers’ market and the local ice cream shop. When she’s there, she often treats herself to bites of her parents’ ice cream and doesn’t feel guilty about it. She does not think eating healthy is as difficult as adults sometimes make it seem. She abides by an eating philosophy radical in its simplicity: Eat good food and enjoy it.       

  1. Sometimes all you need is a nap.

Mayla does not pretend to be perfect. There are times when no amount of work, play, or food will fulfill her. During these times she simply needs what most of us crave every afternoon: a nap. A good, dark-room, fan-on, A/C-down, uninterrupted nap. When she wakes up she is refreshed and happy and ready to explore again.  

  1. Pet your dogs.
  2. Read, often.

If Mayla is not eating, sleeping, playing, or working, she’s likely reading a book. She has her favorites—Blue Hat, Green Hat; Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?; Will You Be My Sunshine?—but is willing to try new ones, too. She loves the rhythm of the words and simple beauty of the illustrations. She loves pointing at pictures of things she recognizes, like “buhh”s (birds), “duahh”s (dogs), and “wawa” (water). She reads probably a dozen books a day, at all times of the day. Books, Mayla has reminded me, are sometimes the only entertainment we need. 

  1. Go outside when it’s sunny.
  2. Go outside when it’s raining.

Mayla is not brought down by the presence of rain; she is energized by it. As soon as she sees water falling from the sky, she excitedly points outside and exclaims, “Wawa!” She then relentlessly asks to go outside, and we eventually must let her, such is her desire to go play in the rain. When she gets her wish, she toddles around through the wet grass and splashes in puddles and raises her arms up to catch the miraculous wet drops falling from above. Her joy in these moments is pure. 

  1. Expressing your feelings and communicating are important.

Mayla has big feelings, and she does not shy away from sharing them. When she is happy, we know. When she is sad or angry, we know. When she is confused, we know. There is something refreshing in knowing exactly what she’s feeling at any given moment, because even if we can’t do something to immediately make her feel better, at least we understand and sometimes that’s all that matters. Carly, my wife, is especially adept at helping Mayla navigate her feelings. “I see that you’re sad,” she’ll tell our daughter. “But we are about to eat dinner, so I don’t want you to fill up on more Cheerios.” Sometimes simply the soothing sound of her mom’s voice will help her become calm; other times it won’t, but Mayla will know that her feeling was identified and understood.   

At some point as we grow up we are conditioned to hide weakness, to hide those big feelings, and sometimes that makes it difficult for others to understand. Mayla has reminded me that emotions are real and it’s OK to share them. We don’t have to be perfect. We just have to be honest.   

  1. The world is a vast, beautiful place.

My 18-month-old daughter thinks it’s an absolute joy to be alive. Sometimes she can’t believe that she gets to, every day, explore the world. She thinks it’s a privilege to watch birds fly and rabbits run and water rush through the creek. She thinks every rock on the ground and every airplane flying above is a joy, a miracle. She doesn’t take for granted that she gets to splash in puddles and read books and play with toys. She appreciates the simplicity of walking the dogs around the neighborhood and pointing up to the mountains along the way. She is endlessly curious and endlessly happy. 

I love her.  

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The Teaching Dilemma

Thousands of teachers in North Carolina left their jobs last year. I was almost one of them—until the heart won its battle with the head.

Illustration by Samantha Harrington

*Editor’s note: All student names have been changed.

They cried. As the principal came on the intercom for his last announcement of the year, as they finished the final lines of their impromptu karaoke of “See You Again,” their arms linked with their classmates-turned-friends, as final minutes, then seconds, of their fifth-grade year trickled by, as the bell rang to release them for summer, a typically joyous occasion, half of my fifth-grade students were in tears. Brittany’s eyes were red and puffy. Eva’s tears were streaming down her face, under her blue surgical mask. Camila turned to her friend and said, “This is the first time I’m sad to leave school for the summer.”

The past school year, more than most, meant something to them, and to me. We created, my fifth graders and I, something special, memorable. Our class, at the risk of sounding cliché, felt like something close to a family. They bickered like siblings, knew one another’s strengths and flaws and idiosyncrasies, laughed and fought and cried together. They knew that Jeremiah liked at least two sleeves of grape jelly on his biscuit every morning. They enjoyed the fact that Erica owned over 50 birds, and listened and asked questions as she led a presentation about them every Friday during “Bird Talk with Erica.” They appreciated Ada’s love of Star Wars, and Evan’s obsession with Pokémon. They, whether or not they realized it, filled a classroom with love. 

As I watched them say goodbyes to friends new and old on that final day of school, I fought back tears of my own. I thought about the journey that led me to that specific moment, one that took me from coast to coast and dropped me in the mountains of North Carolina. I thought about how much the young people in front of me had grown since August. I thought about how becoming a teacher had changed my life. 

I thought about a lot during those final minutes of our school year, but hanging over every thought, like a cloud promising rain, was a brutally simple question: Was this my last day of school, too?

Last school year, of the five I’ve taught, was the most challenging. There were days I left the building defeated, or worse, disillusioned. Sometimes I’d spot a teacher friend in the hallway, and we’d simply share a knowing look and sigh. Teaching during a pandemic, devoting our not limitless energy and time to countless things unrelated to academics, worrying if we’ll make enough money to support (or start) a family—all of of the problems that have for years plagued public-school teachers, especially in North Carolina—they all began to, finally and inevitably, bear consequences. A teacher around my age found a new job and started it after winter break. Others took weeks off to recalibrate. Several teachers I know joined the almost 8,000 (!!) in the state who planned to leave the profession altogether.

For most of the year, I thought I’d be one of them. The realities of working full-time for not enough pay and being a dad became immediately and strikingly clear: When I got home from school, I’d usually tutor or complete my work as a teaching assistant for a college course to supplement our income. All I could think about during those hours was that I was missing spending time with Mayla, our now 17-month-old daughter, that I was missing her grow up. 

And that was at home. At school, chaos reigned. For the first half of the year, I usually spent the first 30 minutes of every day trying to figure out who was allowed to be there: Was that scratchy throat and runny nose dripping into their mask COVID or just allergies? Wait, was she technically exposed since they were outside but weren’t wearing masks? Does that kid need to show me a negative test so he can learn about fractions today? How many days was he in quarantine? I had to send more than one kid home, pulling them out in the hallway to tell them that according to the ever-changing policies they were not supposed to be at school. They handled the news, as ever, like champions: This was their new world.

When a student in my class tested positive, an administrator would walk down to my room, carrying a pool noodle (they’re exactly six feet, apparently) to determine who else was potentially exposed and therefore had to go home and quarantine for 14 (and later, 10, and later, seven, and later, five) days. I didn’t keep track, but I’d estimate that in my class alone the total number of days missed by students was over 100. They fell behind, of course, because if virtual learning taught us anything, it’s that it doesn’t teach students anything.

(None of this is to complain about pandemic policies or downplay the severity of a new and scary and often deadly virus; it is simply to say that how to be an effective micro-scale public health coordinator was not something they taught us in grad school [not that North Carolina values grad school, because they don’t pay a master’s degree supplement].)

COVID, of course, also exacerbated other issues that had already plagued the public-school system: behavior problems, achievement gaps, transportation. Our school, like so many others across our county and country, had a severe shortage of bus drivers, which meant that the ones we did have ran two, sometimes three, loads of students to and from school, which meant that teachers and other staff members were arriving hours early and staying hours late to supervise the early arrivers and late departers (who were often the same kids). During one particularly rough stretch, a group of students who lived in the same apartment complex had to leave school 20 minutes before the bell rang, missing out on instruction and time with teachers and friends, because it was the only way we could get them home before 6 p.m. If one of the drivers, God bless them, got sick or had to miss school—COVID or otherwise—the entire system came crumbling down. They couldn’t drive (and if you think hiring a bus driver is difficult, try to find a substitute), which meant many of their students couldn’t get to or from school because their parents worked early or late and they were relying on the bus. I remember missing a couple of my students one day because their bus wasn’t running and thinking that being unable to transport a child to and from school has to be one of the biggest failures of the public-school system ever.

Teachers got sick and had to miss school too, of course, and if that happened finding a substitute to replace him for a day was often close to impossible. When a class didn’t have a sub, usually a support staff member (media specialist, intervention teacher) would step in to cover it, which of course affected their own schedule and their students’ learning. Worse still, if there were several teachers out without substitutes, there wasn’t enough support staff at the school to cover their classes, so the students would be split into other teachers’ classrooms: More than once I had students from other classes arrive at my classroom door asking where they should sit for the day. (During all of this, we were called to a meeting in which a higher up in the system told us our students’ test scores were troubling.)   

Not that there were easy solutions: Teachers and administrators and staff at our school worked long days and often long nights simply to keep the school running; this wasn’t an issue of not caring or working hard enough. No, this was an issue of finding answers to often unanswerable questions. This was, as had become the trite saying, unprecedented. 

We were exhausted and sometimes broken. As every restaurant and grocery store around town started posting “We’re Hiring” on their road signs, we began to do the uncomplicated math: at almost $20 an hour for some of those jobs, accounting for working summers, we could make nearly the same salary we did teaching. One day after school my friend from down the hall came to me and said, “Today was one of those days that made me want to go pack boxes at Amazon.” At that moment I couldn’t come up with an argument against it. (And that’s not to take anything away from people who work those jobs, which are not trivial, or to say that they don’t deserve the salary they earn; it’s to say that teachers are underpaid relative to their training.)

It all began to feel unsustainable. For the first time in my career, I began to feel what everyone warned me about when I became a teacher: burned out.

So I began looking for a way out.

On the second-to-last day of school, less than 24 hours before my students cried during their final moments of fifth grade, I had a third-round interview for a writing job at a science education technology company. If I progressed, I’d have a final interview before the company decided whether to offer me the position. 

The application and subsequent interview process were intense—multiple essay questions, an initial interview with a manager, a writing challenge that took close to 10 hours of planning and research, an interview in which two senior team members critiqued and peppered me with questions about that writing challenge, an interview with other team members that required me to come up with several ideas for a potential science video—but I was relatively prepared, because six months earlier I had gone through the nearly the exact same thing for a similar job with a similar company. 

I was prepared to leave teaching halfway through the year. 

The jobs, which were fully remote, came with tantalizing benefits—401K matching! Weeks of (or unlimited) PTO! Free health and dental! Three months of paid paternity leave!—and a salary that doubled what I earned teaching. The complete package was more than six figures, easy. 

The contrast with teaching was striking. When Mayla was born toward the end of the previous school year, I took three weeks—15 days—and had to use sick leave for all of them. My wife, Carly, who also works in the public-school system, took 12 weeks and was paid for exactly zero of them. 

It baffled me: I could earn double my salary with benefits dwarfed those provided by teaching without gaining any extra training, education, or experience. I was still the same exact person! There was a job out there—multiple jobs—that valued my skill set (which, to be fair, is not that impressive) at least 100 percent more than the public education system did. I didn’t realize that this market existed for me. I thought a career change would involve, like it does for most other jobs, going back to school and earning another degree. 

I was taken: I imagined spending mornings writing and researching in our home office before heading downstairs to eat lunch with Mayla, and then maybe taking the dogs for a walk during a mid-afternoon break. I imagined taking a day off without feeling guilty. I imagined, overall, feeling less stressed. One of my greatest sources of worry as a dad was (and is) earning enough to support Mayla and our family, and this would have all but eliminated it. All of this, naturally, only increased my resentment for the current education landscape. These jobs wouldn’t be perfect, of course, I knew that, but it was difficult to think that getting either of them wouldn’t be a positive career and family move. 

But there lingered, during every hour spent applying to jobs and preparing for interviews, during runs spent pondering my future and the drives home after, a question I tried hard to ignore: Was I selling out?

Turns out I never had to answer it, because I didn’t get either job. After each final interview, I was emailed a stock rejection from the company’s HR rep. But the fact that at least some part of me questioned my willingness to leave teaching for a higher-paying, less stressful job surprised me. And the reason, as always, was what the entire crumbling, confusing, contradictory education system is built upon, and will be forever: the kids. 

Because every time I thought about my new life working remotely, I also thought about Patrick, who went from never turning in assignments to becoming one of the strongest math students in the class and crushing the end-of-year test. Every time I imagined a day without the unnecessary bureaucracy of education, I also thought about Joy, who showed up in tears on the first day of school and by the end of the year was confidently running my classroom. Every time I wondered what life would be like working in the real world, I also thought about Abby, who organized the entire class writing inspirational notes before I left to run the Boston Marathon, leaving me with no words and red eyes. I knew, no matter the companies’ claims of Improving the education of every child! and Implementing innovative, thoughtful solutions to personalize learning!, that they weren’t the same as being in the classroom, never would be. They couldn’t and wouldn’t match the feeling of flipping the lights on every morning and preparing for the rush of questions and stories and life that came from teaching a group of 10-year-olds. They would never come close to the love you felt as you gazed, from the front of your classroom, at those wide-eyed young people you were responsible for. They couldn’t replicate the pride you felt when one of them told you about finishing Harry Potter or the laughter that echoed around the classroom when one of them tried to teach you ballet. There would be no more inside jokes and personalized handshakes and sticky notes on my desk with fun facts. There would be no more Patricks or Joys or Abbys. They would be out there somewhere, sure, but I wouldn’t get to know them. And that ate at me. 

Because that’s all it’s ever been about, right? I realized early in my career, with startling clarity, that our students, those 20-plus (sometimes 30-plus!) vessels of humanity seeking our guidance, our wisdom, our presence—they are the reason teachers endure what they endure. They are the reason we bear the early mornings and late afternoons spent in the quiet aloneness of our classrooms, the after-school duties and meetings during planning, the ever-changing guidelines and protocols, the endless parade of important-sounding acronyms—in short, the challenges that public-school teachers deal with every time we walk in our classrooms. Our students need us. They need our knowledge, our discipline, our strength. They need us to listen to their weird stories and questions, to assuage their worries and fears, to inspire and lead and tell them it’s going to be OK. We are there, first and always, for them. 

I try to remember that simple truth every day: It’s about the kids. That’s all it’s ever been about. 

Therein lies the teaching dilemma: the conflict between rationality and emotion, the endless war between your brain and your heart. Or, as Gary Smith, one of my favorite writers, put it: “An old nettle digs at most every human heart: the urge to give oneself to the world rather than only to a few close people.”  If teachers were all Adam Smith-created (different Smith) rational beings, governed by pure self-interest, the entire system would crumble in days. Because teaching, at its core, is irrational, at least in the economic sense: Most teachers’ skills and experiences would earn them more money, sometimes far more, and perhaps a higher standard of living in another field. There is nothing tying them to their jobs other than a deep, abiding commitment to the young people in front of them (and summers off).

It’s cruel, really: It’s difficult to leave because you know you’ll lose that strong sense of purpose but difficult to stay because of everything else. The question, then, is which part of you do you choose: the pragmatist or the dreamer? That’s the question every teacher, those that left the classroom and those that are starting another year of teaching this week or month or year, wrestled with at some point before they made their decision. There is no right or easy answer.

I made my choice: Yesterday I started my sixth year of teaching. The question for me, then, and all fathers, is how do I teach Mayla which voice to listen to, which itch to scratch? How do I teach her how to balance reason with emotion, logic with passion? Can she—can anyone—have both? For a good portion of last year I thought that I couldn’t be both a good teacher and a good father because I wasn’t around enough, but what I’ve learned is that maybe being a good teacher is part of being a good father, that maybe one of the most important lessons you can teach your child is that the world is complicated and sometimes you have to listen to the nettle that digs at your heart.

All of that’s for the future, though. For now, I’ll simply smile when, on the final pages of her favorite book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, she points to the teacher and proudly says, “Dada!” 

“Yes,” Carly tells her. “Dada is a teacher.”

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What I Talk About When I Talk About Running With My Daughter

Illustration by Samantha Harrington

We blazed, my daughter and I, down the mountain, the trees around us a blur and our hair jetted back like we were on a rollercoaster. I looked down at the watch on my left wrist; it indicated that we were running sub-6-minute-mile pace. Perhaps concerned about the speed, Mayla, my one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, looked back at me through the crack in the stroller awning, as if to ask, You got me, dad? We closed the 6-mile run on one of my favorite trails in 5 minutes and 57 seconds; it was our fastest mile together, and we’ve run many.

We’ve covered miles in our neighborhood, on trails, on the beach, on the dirt road I used to run from my parents’ house as a high schooler in Florida. We’ve run in the heat and cold and rain. We’ve run to blow off steam after a long day and to feel the wind rush past our faces and the oxygen snake through our veins. We’ve run because it is sometimes the best way to give thanks for another day of sun and cloudless skies. We’ve run because sometimes the best thing to do when life gets overwhelming or complicated is to throw on the trainers (HOKAs for me, white low-top Converse for her) and sweat. We’ve run to feel free, alive. We’ve run every mile together. 

I had been looking forward to running with Mayla before she was born, and was slightly disappointed when I found out that she wasn’t old enough to go for a run until she was six months old (count this as one of the many logical things I didn’t know entering fatherhood). But when Carly, my wife, bought me a used running stroller as an early Christmas gift, it was, in the most literal sense of the phrase, as if Christmas had come early.

I took her out in it for her first run later that week; she seemed to love it. Since then, our runs have become something exclusively ours: Dada and Mayla, pounding pavement or crushed gravel, with the squirrels and rabbits and birds often our only companions. They are some of my favorite times as a dad.   

I always wonder what she thinks when we’re running. Often she smiles and points at dogs or other animals passing by, identifying them by name if she knows. Other times she’ll, after minutes of silence, sit up suddenly and yell “Dada!” as if she just remembered who was making her move. “Hi, Mayla!” I’ll respond, and she’ll look back at me, wave her hand dramatically, and say, “Haaii!” with an irrepressible smile. Recently, when she’s bored I guess, she’s started rotating her fists in front of her face, which means she wants to hear “Wheels on the Bus.” And that is why, if you’re around the park near our house at the right time, you’ll hear a dad singing “The people on the bus go up and down/up and down…” through clipped breaths as his daughter throws her hands up, dancing to the song in the stroller that he’s pushing in front of him.

Most of the time, though, she sits there essentially expressionless, taking in the sights and sounds and life around her. It’s in those moments, when I look down at my daughter, the person who changed my life for the better, forever, that we experience something pure, a type of wordless communication of love, the embodiment of stillness and contentment: Just a dad and his daughter covering ground as we were designed to do. I like to think she loves these runs as much as I do. (As if to prove that point, she fell asleep on one run: As we climbed up a steep hill on our first trail run, as the stroller bumped and swung over the uneven ground and Arcade Fire blasted from my phone’s speaker, as I sweat and huffed vigorously, Mayla closed her eyes, put to sleep by the rhythms of running. She awoke shortly after to eat a snack once we reached the top of the hill.)

I don’t know if Mayla will become a runner when she’s older; I won’t attempt to sway her one way or another. I mostly want her to appreciate its simplicity and groundedness with the natural world, to understand that there’s value in making your heart work hard and letting your mind escape the everyday, to see that the world is vast and gain important perspective. Maybe she’ll find that through running, or maybe it will be something else.

Right now, though, we’re going to keep running. A few weeks ago we went out for a 2-miler, and about a mile-and-a-half in it began to rain, gradually picking up in intensity. We were still a good half-mile from our house, so I tried to cover her the best I could with the awning as we turned home. A few seconds later, we hit a significant bump, and my phone flew from the top of the stroller into her lap. I walked around to the front of the stroller to retrieve it. 

“You ready?” I asked, extending my hand. She looked me in the eye and returned my fist bump.

So the father and daughter ran home in a growing rain. 

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An Ode to Summer

Here’s to those days with endless light, to those days we spent together…

Illustration by Samantha Harrington

Long live those long, unhurried days of summer, when the sun sank behind the mountains as we finished up a late dinner and let Mayla search for fireflies in the backyard before a late bedtime. Long live its sounds and smells, the hiss of the grill and the new plastic of inflatable pools. Long live the heat and the storms and the cool gray nights. Long live summer.   

Summer, for teachers, is special, perhaps even sacred, but this one carried more meaning for me: It was the first real one I spent with Mayla, our vibrant, curious, exhausting 17-month-old daughter. Last year, both because of her age and her dependence on Carly for feeding, father-daughter time was relatively and understandably limited. And this summer, with Carly, my wife, working part-time, we tried to make up for it.

So, with the summer officially ending in less than a week (teachers in our county go back to work on Monday), here is what I’ll remember from those two precious months with my daughter.

I’ll remember taking her on hikes, strapping her to my chest as she pointed to the trees and leaves all around us and keeping her content with a ready supply of her favorite snacks. I’ll remember the trips to the library, where every book was her favorite book and she waddled around the kids section as if it were her home. I’ll remember our family trip to the science museum, where she played with rocks and trains and colored pictures of weasels as her father read a Carl Sagan quote about the vastness of the universe and the smallness of Earth on the wall. I’ll remember discovering that her name means “one who loves water” and thinking how fitting that was as we watched her play in endless pools and creeks and puddles and hoses. I’ll remember her learning how to say water, her demands for “wawa”—either to drink or play in—echoing around our house daily.

I’ll remember pushing her in the stroller for runs around our neighborhood, in the rain, on my favorite trail in the woods. I’ll remember her falling asleep once we reached the top of the climb, the rhythm of running and sounds of summer making her eyes heavy. I’ll remember watching her walk around a fairy garden with my mom, swing on a swing set built by my dad, listen to my sister read about an insatiable caterpillar. I’ll remember her demanding to be read Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? and Red Hat, Green Hat and Will You Be My Sunshine? at least 50 times each. I’ll remember the joy and wonder on her face when she discovered that like the teacher in Brown Bear, Brown Bear, Carly also wore glasses, her little neurons forever firing and connecting as she pointed back and forth from the illustration to Carly’s face. I’ll remember when she learned how to ask us to play “Wheels on the Bus” by attempting to rotate her fists over each other but looking more like she was speed punching a tiny punching bag in front of her face. I’ll remember her insistence on helping us with chores around the house: dumping laundry into the machine, feeding the dogs (and picking up every dropped piece of food one-by-one), handing us clean spoons to put away from the dishwasher.

I’ll remember teaching her how to kick a soccer ball and give a fist bump, that “luna” is Spanish for moon, and that the best flavor of ice cream in the summer is strawberry. I’ll remember her getting a zucchini that was almost as tall as her from our friend’s garden, and watching her eat a tomato, like an apple, straight off the vine from her aunt’s. I’ll remember the smells of grilled salmon, crisp watermelon, fresh basil sitting on the kitchen windowsill—and our long, slow lunches on Sundays. 

I’ll remember traveling down to south Florida to see her aunt, and up to rural New York to see her extended family. I’ll remember changing her diaper in the plane bathroom on the flight there, bouncing with the turbulence as she smiled up at me from the too-small changing pad. I’ll remember picking blueberries with her in the garden of the great-grandma she never met but loved her deeply, laughing as she ate four of every five she picked, and watching her swing from the same tree that Carly used to in the summers. Finally, I’ll remember watching the river with her later that day, sitting on a bench outside of our hotel as a soft breeze made the flowers around us dance as she looked out at the water and rested her hand on my leg, reminding me that, sometimes, the best thing you can do as a dad is simply be there. 

Mostly, I’ll remember this as the summer I got to know my daughter better: her moods, her intricacies, her thoughts and desires. I knew her, of course, and fatherhood doesn’t stop once the school year begins, but this summer was something beyond the normal break from work, something that felt important.

I will miss it.

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My Complicated Nostalgia for Baby Bottles

Bottles were at the center of our long, challenging journey to feed our daughter. Why do I miss them?

Illustration by Samantha Harrington

Every night for months, just before we put our daughter, Mayla, to bed, Carly fed her from a bottle. Reclining in the crook of Carly’s elbow, Mayla’s wide blue eyes would stare up into her mother’s with a look of determination and contentment as she drained the milk or formula from within. The whole process would take no more than three minutes. They were among the best of my day.

Watching Mayla drink from her bottle produced a cocktail of complicated emotions. For months, the most prominent one was relief: Mayla, for the first five months of her life, simply couldn’t drink from one, her lips and tongue and brain unable to harmonize into the sucking pattern that came naturally for most other babies. She was 100 percent dependent on Carly for food and, therefore, survival. So when she finally started taking a bottle, in what seemed like a miracle, her every sip reminded me of the long, challenging journey there.  

Near the end of her bottle feeding days, though, I began to feel something deeper. Silently sitting and watching the most powerful woman I know feed the most important thing to ever happen to us, the white noise from the sound machine slowly growing in intensity and the lamp gradually dimming, I felt peace, a firm sense that, after years of trying to figure out post-college life, I was exactly where I was supposed to be: living those moments, as Barack Obama wrote in A Promised Land, “when the world slows down, your strivings get pushed to the back of your mind, and all that matters if that you are present, fully, to witness the miracle of your child growing up.”

And soon, I knew, those moments would be gone, replaced by new ones, because, yes, Mayla was growing up. She was going to graduate from the bottle any day, to straw cups, and in my mind that marked her progression to becoming a toddler. Her bottle, for so long a source of frustration, had become one of the final things tethering her to babyhood. And that, more than anything else so far in our journey, made clear one of the fundamental truths of parenting: Youth, as one of my favorite writers put it, doesn’t bother to say goodbye.

Around her sixth week of life, we discovered that Mayla had a tongue and lip tie. In biological terms, it meant that the frenulum under her tongue and upper lip were both too tight and too restricted to allow proper tongue and lip movement; these movements are necessary for sucking, swallowing, and, later, speech. In applicable terms, it meant that she had lots of trouble eating. 

Not only was she inefficient—breastfeeding sessions, which typically last 10 to 20 minutes, would often take Mayla 45—she was not getting enough milk: At her three-month check-up at the pediatrician, she had dropped from the mid-20th percentile to the 6th for weight. Usually when a baby has trouble breastfeeding you can supplement with a bottle; Mayla was not usually. Bottles hung limply from her lips, which didn’t know how to extract the milk. Her only way of eating was laboring for hours every day to get less than what she needed.  

Constantly being hungry and never being able to eat enough, of course, affected her mood and sleep, which affected her parents’ mood and sleep. She was, thankfully, developing properly in every other way, but as her parents it was hard to think you were doing a good job when your firstborn was going to bed hungry.

Mayla’s inability to eat well and take a bottle bore consequences daily. Carly could not leave her, ever, because Mayla, psychologically and often literally, was attached to her: Mom was the only way to get food. (I often told—and tell—Carly that she legitimately, for more than five months, kept another human alive, was her sole source of nutrition. At the time it perhaps seemed unremarkable; it was simply what she had to do, and she’d do it again without hesitation. But the quiet, consistent strength it required was something close to heroic.) We couldn’t go anywhere because Mayla would simply scream in the car, or at our destination, because she was hungry; or if we did make it somewhere, she’d have to eat for another 45 minutes. Our days mostly consisted of hanging out around the couch, waiting for Mayla to finish eating or begin again soon.     

We tried everything to get her to take a bottle, which would, we knew, significantly improve our life. The first step was to get the tongue and lip tie fixed, through a not-inexpensive procedure called a frenectomy, but that, surprisingly and unfortunately, did little to improve her feeding skills. The pediatric dentist who performed the frenectomy gave us exercises for her mouth and tongue designed to help her (re)learn how to suck, and we did them daily, religiously. Still, no improvement. 

We talked to our pediatrician. We talked to several lactation consultants. We talked to a pediatric nutrition team at the hospital. We tried no fewer than a dozen different bottles. We drove an hour to an orofacial myologist, who poked and prodded around her mouth. We drove 40 minutes to a craniofacial myologist, who gave her what seemed to be an extremely light massage. We took Mayla to a chiropractor (for real), who gave her what had to be the gentlest neck adjustment in history. Very little of this was covered by insurance—we spent a few thousand dollars trying to help our daughter learn how to take a bottle—and very little of it brought about improvements in her eating.

We were discouraged, and desperate. I remember thinking, What if she just never takes a bottle? I knew that some babies, of course, were exclusively breastfed, but that was not our plan. Carly needed a break; the current system was wholly unsustainable and typically unjust. I could leave the house to run, or go out of town for a friend’s bachelor party, or simply cook dinner or take a 10-minute shower. Carly couldn’t do any of those things, had to miss the final month of school and her best friend’s bachelorette party because she couldn’t be away from Mayla. 

Intensifying matters was the fact that Carly, an elementary school speech therapist, was due back at work at the end of the summer; if Mayla couldn’t take a bottle by then, she wouldn’t be able to return to work, and we would have had to find a way to make up that lost salary. I was already working two part-time jobs in addition to teaching, and I began looking into more. As the weeks passed in July, and then August, our anxiety grew. We had a deadline by which Mayla, lest there be even more significant changes in our lives, had to take a bottle. 

What was alarming, both then and now, was the complete lack of accessible guidance on how to proceed if your baby won’t take a bottle (and the time and money spent if you ever found it). We were—I was—lucky that Carly, who possesses a deep knowledge of infant feeding and orofacial anatomy, knew where to look and what to research. Even then, though, at times the advice we received from highly educated professionals was either conflicting or simply reduced to: Have you tried this bottle?

In the end, I have no idea what saved us. Perhaps the bottle Mayla eventually liked—a Lansinoh with a purple cap—was the difference-maker, or maybe something suddenly clicked between her brain, lips, and tongue that allowed her to finally develop the sucking reflex we had spent several months and thousands of dollars trying to achieve. All I knew was that it was one of the greatest feelings of my life.

“OMG,” Carly texted me on August 10 at 12:05 p.m. I was at work.  “SHE JUST TOOK A WHOLE OUNCE FROM THE BOTTLE.”

“I’m going to cry,” I wrote back.

The first time I bottle fed my daughter was later that day; she was five months old. Carly took a video of it, and as I watch it now I’m struck with how pure my joy is: I smiled for the entirety of the 35-second feeding session (from 45 minutes to 35 seconds…). I gave her encouragement and watched with pride as she guzzled the milk. “That’s amazing,” I concluded once the bottle was empty. And it was: I could finally feed our baby, and Carly, throughout the upcoming weeks and months, could finally become something close to a normal human again. 

The last time I bottle fed her was…I honestly don’t remember. It became such a quotidian experience that it stopped being memorable (despite my proclamations in the months prior that I would never take it for granted) and soon became obsolete. Mayla drinks milk and water from straw cups now, and eats solid food: blueberries and oatmeal and broccoli and salmon. She is a thriving toddler with no shortage of curiosity, energy, and emotion, the best part of my day every day. 

Every now and again, though, especially before she goes to bed, I’m hit with a pang of nostalgia about her bottle feeding days. She was so small, dependent: She just looked like a baby when she drank from a bottle. Now she can tell us, with sign language or the few words she knows, when and what she wants to eat, and walk over to her high chair to show us where she’d like to eat it. Now, instead of feeding her a bottle from the reclining chair before bed, we attempt to read her Goodnight Moon for the 800th time as she tries to squirm free to turn the lamp on and off unceasingly. Now, I relearn every day, she is not a baby anymore.

So there they lay, the bottles, there they lay in a neat pile in a clear tub that sits in our attic, relics of a past I didn’t think I would ever miss. 

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Boston, Finally.

For six years the jacket hung in the back of my closet. It came with me from a subletted room in San Diego, to a condo shared with my sister in Gainesville, to my childhood home in Port Orange, to two apartments in Asheville, to our new home in a little town near Hendersonville, to, finally, a carry-on bag in Boston.

It’s a nice jacket: adidas, blue and yellow, lightweight. I paid $100 for it. It’d keep you warm on a cold run, or serve as something comfy and casual to wear anywhere. There have been countless times that it would have come in handy. I really liked this jacket.

For six years I refused to wear it.

I dropped out of the 2016 Boston Marathon. Around mile 15, after a decent start, I started wheezing: scratchy, clipped, labored breathing. I hadn’t had an asthma attack in years, but I convinced myself that this was one, or about to become one. I walked off the course, in tears, to the red medical tent, where nurses checked my vitals and gave me a phone to call whoever I needed to call to tell them my marathon was over. I then boarded a bus to the finish line in the city, next to other broken dreamers, riding on the highway past the iconic course where we were supposed to be running. I was embarrassed, and so, so sad.

When I got to the finish line, where thousands of other runners were experiencing perhaps the greatest running moment of their lives, a place of uncontainable joy and triumph, I sat alone on stone steps and cried. I called my parents.

“I —” my voice cracked. I could barely speak. “I—I had to drop out.”

They, and everyone else, were beyond understanding. You had to listen to your body, they said. It was the right call, they told me. Your body betrayed you, they assured me.

For a while, I believed them, and in moments when you’re physically vulnerable it’s natural to make decisions based on self-preservation. But I think what really happened was perhaps simpler, and harder to accept: I was scared.

At mile 15, my pace had fallen off, my legs were getting heavy, and I was in pain. I was scared of posting a slow time, of shuffling 11 more miles, of hurting for another 90 minutes. I panicked and walked off the course of the most famous footrace in the world.

For six years, memories of that decision, that unfinished race, haunted me. The jacket—a Boston Athletic Association logo-emblazoned hoodie I bought at the pre-race expo—became the physical manifestation of those demons. It was a symbol of my failure. Every time I caught a glance of it in the back of my closet, I was reminded of that day.

I made a pact with myself soon after that race: I would not put on the jacket until I crossed the finish line of the Boston Marathon.

In that time I, like most rudderless millennials in their early 20s, moved and grew and otherwise experienced life. In 2016 I was confused and directionless: After a mere eight months in my first real job, the one I spent at least four years, several internships, and many thousands of dollars preparing for, I decided I didn’t want to pursue it as a career. A month after I (kind of) ran Boston, I moved from a room in San Diego to a condo on the opposite side of the country to live with my sister and study to become a teacher. I was 23 and lost.

That inexperience, that lack of perspective, was reflected in the race. As soon as things went south that day, as soon as I became uncomfortable, I broke. I thought my (sure-to-be-slow) time was the most important thing that day; I thought I was bigger than Boston. I failed to realize that I was in the middle of the oldest, most famous, most glorious, marathon in the world. I didn’t think about the hundreds of thousands of men and women—the Salazars and Rodgerses and Switzers, of course, but also the everyday warriors who were running for something bigger than themselves, for love or loss or hope—who had spilled their (literal) blood, sweat, and tears on the undulating pavement below. I didn’t think about the men, 241 years earlier almost to the day, who had officially started a revolution near the course in Lexington and Concord, fighting and often dying for a country that didn’t yet exist. I didn’t know that the course was initially inspired by the ever-famous ride of Paul Revere to alert his countrymen that war was imminent. I didn’t think about how lucky I was to have the ability to run, to move as we were divinely designed, bipedal locomotion on a grand scale. I was simply upset that I was going to run 15 minutes slower than I hoped.

I vowed that my next time at Boston would be different.

In those intervening years, I found a calling, fell in love, moved again, got married, bought a house, lived through a pandemic, and, most significantly and life-alteringly, became a father to a persistent, strong, beautiful baby girl. This all made me tougher, instilled in me a valuable perspective about life and its waves. A bad race at Boston would suck; but what would suck even more is not having a job to pay the mortgage. Like most people, I was (am) a much stronger person than I was a year after graduating college.

The jacket transformed with me, evolving from a garment of shame to a training tool. Near the end of a 20-mile run a couple years ago, training for a Boston qualifier, I was struggling to keep the agreed-upon pace of 6:20 a mile to close the run. My best friend and training partner Jordan turned to me and snarled, “Think of Boston! Think of your jacket!” I caught up with him with a 6:17, and qualified for Boston a few weeks later with a 2:52 marathon, a new PR.

Before I left the house for another 20-miler last month, I was pissed. It was 6 a.m. and I forgot the time changed early that morning, so we lost an hour of sleep. I, like most runners, didn’t want to go run for two-plus hours while most of the world was sleeping. I opened my closet and peeked in the back: the silver lines on the jacket’s shoulder sleeves gleamed in the dark. Jordan and I met and ran one of our best long runs of the training cycle. I knew then that I could be only weeks away from wearing it for the first time.

Throughout training, I tried not to make the race bigger than it was: It was simply a marathon, 26 miles and 385 yards, just like the ones I’d run before. But I knew that was a lie. Despite growing up and recognizing that there are more important things than my marathon time, I knew that this time Boston represented something more. I knew that it was a shot at redemption, something elusive and rare: Many others never get one, and I wanted to cherish mine. I knew that it, like all races but even more significantly for Boston, was a chance to show my family, my friends, my wife, my 13-month-old daughter, myself that all of the sacrifices they and I made—the hours spent away running, the nightly old-man stretches, the neurotic, often annoying discussions of various anatomical maladies—had value. I knew that it was a way to show my fifth-grade students, who had sent me off with a gift basket and inspirational letters, that all of our talks about perseverance and priorities and life were not empty. I knew that it was an opportunity to show my daughter (or at least tell her when she’s old enough to understand) that sometimes the best thing to do when life kicks your ass is to lace up your trainers and head out the door for another 10-miler in the mountains. “If you fall from the horse,” as my favorite soccer coach put it, “the best thing you can do is go immediately back on it.” I wanted to show her that you should always get back on the horse.

So, yes, Boston was more than a race; it was Something Big; I knew I wouldn’t be the same after. I carried this weight throughout training and to the starting line, where, with the sound of the starter’s pistol, it was lifted, finally, into the brisk Massachusetts air—and I could simply run.

And for the first seven miles, clipping off 6:20 miles next to Jordan, surrounded by thousands of other runners and spectators, under the sun and a cloudless sky, it was perhaps the greatest running experience of my life. My legs felt light and smooth, my heart and lungs working together efficiently and effortlessly, and I thought, Could this be the day?

But it was a marathon, of course, and Boston is particularly relentless, unsparing with its combination of uphills and downhills, punishing those who start off too aggressively. By miles 9 and 10, the initial relief running provided had worn off, and the uncomplicated calculus of the marathon set in: I still had 16 miles to go. And then the wheels came off. My legs became suddenly heavy; each step required far more effort than before. An ill-timed knee/calf/hamstring injury, which had caused me to taper more aggressively than I wanted during the final weeks of training, flared: My right leg became tight and even heavier and began hurting with each step. I hit halfway in 1:24, perfectly on pace for my goal of sub-2:50, but I knew that it wasn’t going to last.

I reached the point, at the edge of Newton, one of the several small towns the course runs through, where I dropped out in 2016 because I was significantly off pace and hurting. Six years later, I found myself in nearly the exact same situation—cinderblock legs, slow pace, double-digit miles still to go—running in nearly the same exact scene—a dense, rowdy crowd oblivious to my hurting, cheering in front of red-brick buildings—and I thought to myself, This is what life comes to, isn’t it? These choices, these moments…

And I did what I told myself I’d do in the low moments. I kept running.

Or, more accurately, I shuffled. The 6s marking the miles on my watch quickly became 7s, then 8s (and even one 9). I moved over to the right side of the road, like a slow car on the highway, as no fewer than 1,500 runners passed me. My aspirations for a fast time vaporized; the race simply became about surviving and enjoying.

I told myself that I simply had an 11- or 9- or 7-mile run ahead of me, something I’d done countless times before, and this one was on a historic course with thousands of other people running next to me and Boston College students on the side of the road screaming “I SEE YOU, 2765!” (my bib number). When I reached mile 21, I told myself I simply had to run one more Friday Five, a quintessential college run with the boys, envisioning those runs in Chapel Hill as I ran in real time close to Boston.

Throughout it all, I tried to soak in the experience as much as possible, to do everything I failed to do last time, to continue seeing the forest among the trees. Boston was a celebration of running, and of life, and I didn’t want to let my pride interfere again. I found my family at mile 20 and stopped to kiss my daughter. I pumped up the crowd. I high-fived little kids and middle-aged women. I laughed at clever signs and nodded in appreciation to the people holding them. I talked to my twitching legs as they were about to cramp. I fought the urge to walk by telling myself to just make it to the next mile marker; I did this for at least seven miles. I saw, by random chance, a girl I graduated college with cheering on the side of the course, whom I hadn’t seen in seven years, and thought about how the world can be so vast—with runners around me from every U.S. state and 99 other countries—and yet so small. I sang to myself, talked to myself, listened to myself. I felt unapologetically alive.

As I entered Boston, where the energy from the crowd was a living, breathing, tangible thing, where you can feel its love like a punch, I smiled for 30 straight minutes. I was there, practically: three miles, a 5K, to go. Until then, in the back of my mind lived the fear, as much as I didn’t want to admit it, that I wasn’t going to finish again. For the first time in six years, I knew for a fact that I was.

The last mile was a spiritual experience. Despite peak cramping, I felt like I was floating, living out a surreal dream. The disappointment of six years ago seemed to melt away with every slow step. I followed the curves of the road, the sounds of the crowd, and entered the famous final stretch: Right on Hereford, left on Boylston…

The last 100 meters were a cacophony of noise and emotion. I told myself to enjoy every painful step, to remember these moments because it doesn’t get better than this. I thought, probably correctly, that this was how it was supposed to happen, a long, grinding struggle to the finish line, because if everything had gone my way that day, if my body had allowed me to keep clipping off the pace I intended to run, if I had never hurt and things had never gotten truly hard, then it all would have been too easy, too clean, not representative of the six-year journey that brought me there. No, it was supposed to be like this: I was supposed to be tested, as a matter of fact supposed to be tested in the exact same spot where I walked off crying last time, because the marathon cuts you to your unvarnished core to see, once and for all, what you’re made of. I passed that test, found out what was inside me, and let myself feel something I don’t usually allow: proud. Yes, despite being 20 minutes slower than I hoped, I was proud of myself and fine to admit it. If I were less dehydrated, I likely would have started crying.

But mostly I just ran, because that’s what this was all about, right?, that’s all this has ever been about, running and everything it’s brought you and changed in you, running along the dirt roads of your childhood as the neighbors told you they’d see you on TV in the Olympics one day, running on suburban streets and overgrown trails, running with your best friends through campus and with your daughter through the park, running through heartbreak and loss and joy and the ceaseless waves of life, running those final steps toward the finish line but knowing, deep down, that you’ll never stop running because it’s part of you forever.

As I crossed the finish line, I threw my hands in the air and let out a violent fist pump. There was a jacket I needed to find and then I would be on my way.

Afterword: Part of me was hesitant to write this because I didn’t want to make myself out to be some type of hero; there are far more impressive things than running a 3:10 marathon (like running a 1:59 marathon) and far more important things than running. But one of the beautiful things about the sport, and particularly Boston, is that everyone—from Scott Fauble, the top American this year with a time of 2:08:52, to the woman who finished in 5-plus hours being interviewed by the local TV station we were watching later that day—has a story that led them to the race, and I think the world is a richer place when people share them. So please know I did not write this for the back-pats and congratulations; I wrote it because it was something that meant a lot to me, even more than I initially thought. Thank you for reading, and thank you, Boston.

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On the Power of Women

Illustration by Samantha Harrington

Somehow, they sold you short. For months, years if you’re around the right people often enough, they told you this would be “the greatest day of your life” and “there’s no other feeling like it in the world” and “cherish every second because it’s over like that.” They tried, with the vocabulary available to them, to describe something that was beyond words, beyond communication, beyond, even, comprehension.

They did not tell you, in the moment your daughter, Mayla Ruth, entered the world, as you watched the midwife unwrap the umbilical cord from her gray neck and she took her first gulp of oxygen, that your own chest would fill with a light you’d never felt before as around you time slowed and surroundings blurred. They did not tell you, as she was placed, softly and immediately, on your wife’s chest, that your head would, instinctively, fall there as well, the first moments of your new family captured not in a picture but solely in your memory, where they will live forever. They did not tell you, as your wife exclaimed, “I did it!” through relieved, joyous, clipped breaths, that you would be crying more than your newborn daughter, the tears falling under your cloth mask. They did not tell you, when they described her, that words like “beautiful” and “gorgeous” and “precious” were somehow not powerful enough; angelic, maybe even divine, would come closer. They did not, could not, tell you any of this, and perhaps that was for the best, because this was, after all, something, like watching the Northern Lights or viewing the Earth from space, that could only be felt.

The intensity of those feelings, of that love, for your daughter were matched only by the same ones for your wife, and the gratitude you felt for the people who delivered your baby: the nurses and midwives at the women-run birth center who guided you through the most intense, and greatest, day of your lives. All of them reminded you, on International Women’s Day no less, of the irrepressible, imperishable power of women.

You learn a truth soon after you find out you are going to be a father: A pregnant woman is a superhero. She carries, for nine months or more, a human inside of her, one that causes her indigestion and nausea and no small amount of pain. For the first few months, she can eat only watermelon and popsicles (maybe, too, a watermelon-flavored popsicle) lest she throw up, her body rejecting foods like it never has before. If she’s lucky enough to keep down the food, it might stay in there for far longer than is normal, or healthy: The only trips she makes to the bathroom are to empty her bladder, again and again and again, like an old man in a Flomax commercial, interrupting sleep, which she wants, and needs, desperately.

The next three months, the second trimester, are supposedly the easiest, because all she has to deal with then is the small fact that a living being is growing inside of her, constantly, expanding her stomach like a slowly inflating balloon. Perhaps, too, she’ll have some “practice” contractions, and her fingers and ankles and feet will swell, rendering quotidian tasks like taking off a wedding band or putting on shoes a true challenge.

Then it gets real. Her belly, by the third trimester, is at the point where strangers ask, “When’s your due date?” Maybe she’ll describe it to you as carrying, in her stomach, a basketball, only the type that constantly kicks and moves and squirms inside of her. On walks around the neighborhood, the basketball will press down on her bladder, requiring her to find, immediately, a bathroom, or simply make her extremely uncomfortable. Preparations for the big day will be made: bags packed, nurseries decorated, floors cleaned and vacuumed over and over. She will waddle around the house, attempting to make everything perfect for her baby’s imminent arrival, a practice, your how-to-be-a-dad books tell you, called “nesting.”

If, for some reason, she is pregnant during a pandemic, she will go through all of this relatively alone, staying home for Christmas, celebrating baby showers on Zoom, talking to her doctors and watching ultrasounds by herself as you are forced to sit in the parking lot. She will not see family, or friends, for weeks, and by the end of it, months. She will ask you, on a random Wednesday, to take her on a ride to see the mountains under the sun and the cloudless sky, to breathe fresh air away from the house. She will cry, sometimes, but she will carry on with a quiet strength that you can only admire.

After all of this, she will describe it as a “pretty easy pregnancy.”

Maybe her preparation, weeks and months in advance, will be worth it soon, and she’ll have her baby on the due date, or perhaps even earlier. Or maybe she will have to wait a bit longer: a few days, or a week, or two. This time, you will learn, moves excruciatingly slow. In these cases—in the midst of countless doctor’s appointments to check the baby’s health and hers, of trips to the chiropractor to maneuver the baby into a better position, of uncomfortable exams and no-stress tests—she will experience a strange cocktail of emotions, a mix of disappointment that the baby is not yet here and disappointment with herself for feeling disappointed, and growing anxiety about labor, and anticipation, and true excitement that it could happen at any moment.

And then, one day, it will.

Or, more accurately, for biological reasons that she will have already explained to you, one night. Maybe the contractions will start around 11 p.m., just as she was ready to lay her head on her pillow to get some necessary sleep; she will attempt to sleep through them at the start, but she will soon learn that that is impossible, like trying to take a walk during a tornado. Instead she will open up her app to time contractions on her phone, and press the green button when they start and red button when they end. At the start, she’ll be able to talk through them, and as you are shuttling in and out of the garage to load up the car you will find her standing in the kitchen, wondering where to place a new sticker on her water bottle. You will smile.

The time between the contractions will get smaller, and their intensity will increase, until she calls the midwife, who will suggest taking a bath to see if they calm. They will not, and after the bath she will lay down, and suddenly she will jump up, sprint to the bathroom, flip open the toilet, and discard her dinner. The contractions, you will learn, have become so intense that in certain positions they make her throw up. “Maybe we should call her back,” she will suggest, and in less than an hour you will be on your way to the birth center as she huffs, from a small sheet of toilet paper, peppermint oil to manage the nausea.

By the time you arrive she will have been in labor for six hours, and the pain will only increase. For the next six hours, you will watch, hopelessly, as she struggles through active labor, her stomach contracting every couple minutes and rendering her speechless. She will sit on a giant exercise ball, her head bent over a pile of towels, and actually, for a few priceless minutes, doze off between contractions; she will try lying down, and again she will throw up from the pain; she will labor in a giant inflatable tub filled with water.

Throughout it all, the midwives and nurses will shuttle in and out of your room, checking on her and measuring the baby’s heartbeat. They will encourage her, suggest different positions to relieve the pain, and patiently answer your questions: “Does that mean it’s OK?” “All good?” “Are we still moving forward?” They will tell you what to do; you will gratefully listen.

You will change the music and massage her shoulders and tell her you love her, but mostly you will sit, in awe, of the strength she shows in the toughest hours of her life and the unassuming grace and professionalism of the other women helping her through them. She will not be able to speak to you, and this is perhaps the toughest part, because up to that point any major challenge you encountered together you discussed together. You will feel, more than any other time in your life, truly, utterly useless, as you watch the person you love most go through something close to an out-of-body experience as you sit next to her, painfully aware of your physical limitations and the injustice of biology.

She will not, contrary to what you remembered from your birth courses, experience any breaks, any letups from contractions. She will say, accurately, in one of her few full sentences in hours, “I feel like this is constant.” Despite this, she will not take any medicine to manage the pain, her mind set on the natural birth she’d planned for months.

And then, suddenly, miraculously, she will be 10 centimeters dilated and her water will break. You remember from your birth course that she has gone through the worst part, the dreaded “transition,” and from here it’s an hour, maybe two, of pushing the baby out. You feel, finally, that there is light at the end of the tunnel, and for the baby that is literal. Your heart starts to beat faster; you know she is close.

Three hours later, she will still be pushing. The worst part, it turned out, was far from over. At this point she will be exhausted, physically of course—over 15 hours without food, 27-plus without sleep—but also emotionally, with little left to give; she will feel nothing but pain; she will forget the reason for all of this. She will not have said a full sentence, or opened her eyes, for nearly 240 minutes. No position—sitting, laying, squatting—will ease her pain. She will, hands on her knees, barely able to hold up her head, tell you, “I’m scared.” At this point you will wonder, as you look out of a crack through the window at a plane leaving a white wake in the light-blue sky, “Is anything worth this?”

The answer will come less than 15 minutes later.

You will later reflect on the experience and conclude that it was the most impressive thing you have ever, and will ever, watched another human being do: 16 hours of unmedicated labor off of zero sleep and fueled only by fruit juice. You will know then, more than ever before, that your wife is the strongest person you know. You will force back an incredulous smile when she describes the labor as “pretty smooth”; you will know, too, that she is right: Every day, women endure labors with greater challenges and complications than hers, and you will feel even more grateful that she and your daughter are healthy and strong. You will be reminded that women are capable of what you thought was impossible.

They are capable of pushing out, through primal screams, a seven-pound human from inside of them. They are capable of forgetting all of the pain—the nine months of sacrifices and hours of searing contractions—almost instantly as they hold their baby in their arms. They are capable of calmly guiding other women through the most intense experience of their lives, and of soothing the nerves, assuaging the fears, of their partners. They are capable of the extraordinary.

And that, perhaps, is the most important lesson you will ever teach your daughter.

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