day 3

wednesday: rock bottom

Wednesday was as much about waiting as anything. We knew we were going home but needed Clara’s doctor to approve her release and the pediatrician to approve our child’s release. We secured the first of these fairly early but the latter one didn’t occur until the afternoon. Clara and I took turns napping in the bed and while the recliner was found to be just as useless for breastfeeding as it was for sleeping.

We didn’t realize it at the time, but we were both running on fumes. Both of us had enjoyed less than four hours of sleep over the previous two nights and that was beginning to take a toll when it came to our higher motor and social skills. Still we were excited to go home where we could at least be able to sleep in our own bed.

Finally all the papers had been signed and releases given and Clara made the triumphal trip out the front door in the most ridiculously oversized wheelchair we had ever seen. Once outside we loaded our little angel into the car seat; a process that sounded somewhat akin to an angel being dragged into hell. We drove away from the hospital with our little bundle of joy growing hoarse from her cries. Apparently Toyota designed the interior of their vehicles to provide the perfect echo chamber for a crying infant. Kudos to them.

By the time we were moving more steadily on the highway her anguish had abated somewhat though her wrath was reignited whenever we came to a stop sign. I never realized how many of those there were between the hospital and our house. A few California rolls later we delivered her safely to our house and into the coordinated hands of Clara’s assembled family. Clara’s grandmother cooked while her mom and sister took turns soothing the baby. Clara’s father was describing traffic conditions or weather patterns or something, but frankly it was a blur. I remember firing off some work-related emails and doing several other non-essential tasks before sitting down for an excellent but rushed dinner with my wife as our child slept peacefully in the nursery. This, we would soon learn, was just our daughter's nefarious way of luring us into a sense of complacency.

By about 10:00pm Clara's family had left and we had both showered and fallen into bed after placing our precious, innocent child into the co-sleeper a few feet from us. The bed felt amazingly soft and comforting and I believe we were commenting on this fact when our child began to stir. Then she began to fuss. And then she took to crying. And that was a prelude to the car-alarm scream that we would come to know so well.

I'll skip over the next two hours to a point in time around midnight when I was feebly attempting to calm her with rocking and singing. I had abandoned first the co-sleeper in the bedroom and then the glider in the nursery and was finally holed-up in the family room in hopes that her cries would be muffled enough to allow my wife to get some sleep. When you have not slept much and all your insecurities about fatherhood are magnified by your child’s unceasing cries, it is difficult to keep yourself from joining in on the waterworks. So when my wife came back in the room she saw an infant crying like a baby whilst being held by a father who was himself crying much like a baby. This was not my finest hour. Luckily Clara had enough working brain cells to sum up the situation and decide on a course of action: she called for backup.

So the blubbering father was sent off to bed as Clara’s sister and boyfriend (both nurses) arrived on the scene. Guilt issues aside, neither Clara nor I had any trouble finally getting several hours of gloriously uninterrupted sleep. In retrospect, I should have gone home on Tuesday night and slept a full night in my own bed so I could be well rested and fully relieve Clara on Wednesday night with all my wits about me. We were both so focused on the birth that he hadn’t really thought much beyond it. That’s such a rookie mistake.

It’s worth mentioning that at no time during this unfortunate cascade of events did Clara or I ever contemplate shaking or otherwise causing harm to our child. That said, I think both of us have a better understanding of where such an impulse comes from. As precarious as our situation seemed at the time, we had many more options than a single teenage mom without the support system we enjoyed. We are forever grateful to that support system (and especially Clara’s sister and boyfriend) for so totally bailing out our sorry, blubbering asses.