Greetings from Daddyland

Being a new parent, especially in the first few weeks, feels a lot like being at Disney World with a terrible head cold. There you are, in the middle of the most wonderful, most amazing, most magical experience you can imagine — and yet you can’t truly enjoy it, because you feel so awful and out-of-it all of the time. So you take pictures and videos constantly, hoping that at some point you’ll be able to look back with a clear head and a good night’s sleep and appreciate what right now you are merely hoping to survive.

That sounds worse than it really is. Our son is a healthy, happy, altogether delightful baby. He smiles at the world with wide-eyed wonder and delight. He coos and gurgles and grins; he lies on his back and wriggles his tiny legs in ways that someone whose heart has a much higher melting point than mine would still find adorable. When I hold his warm little body and he snuggles into the crook of my arm, I feel fulfilled. Complete. And truly, deliriously happy.

But lack of sleep, like lack of clothes or lack of an ozone layer, is a hard thing to ignore. I know that a decade from now, if all goes well, I’ll look back upon these days and wonder how I could have ever missed a moment of the first days of my son’s life. Now, however, I stumble from one end of our house to another at 4 a.m. with a squirming, fussy, red-faced baby in my arms, and realize that my parents and friends were right when they told me that the birth of our child would change my priorities forever. Because I would give up my job, my home, everything I own and everything I hope to ever accomplish for eight uninterrupted hours in a dark room.

It’s also hard to ignore the impact that Baby has had on our lives, for better and for worse. My wife and I are together a lot more since we’ve become parents. We’ve become closer to our families – our own and each others’ – and we spend more of our time at home. We also watch a lot more television and order out from restaurants more often. The home we share has begun to resemble the headquarters of a religious cult, in which everyone wears pajamas all of the time, we repeat nonsense phrases to each other throughout the day, contact with the outside world is limited and our consciousness is modulated by powerful, mind-altering chemicals. (Actually, that only applies to me, since my wife and son are not currently allowed to drink coffee. But I drink enough for the three of us).

I had expected having a baby to put limits on what I’d be able to do. What I hadn’t expected was the degree to which it would change my conception of who I am. I knew, for example, that once Baby came home from the hospital I would no longer be able to go running every morning or hiking every weekend. I had not, however, come to terms with the fact that I am not someone who goes running every morning – or even every other morning – and that I probably never would be, until my wife and I began shopping for strollers.

The stroller my wife favors is light, compact and highly maneuverable. It folds up with the squeeze of a handle, is easy to carry or store and has, my wife reminds me several times a day, a “really great shield from the rain.” The vehicle I have in mind, by contrast, has rugged, balloon-like tires for off-road travel, a heavy, sturdy chassis that allows the passenger to survive collisions with other strollers or slow pedestrians and an absurd number of pockets, pouches and hidden compartments.

It also has a dock for an iPod.

I am, I will admit, a little bit in love with this stroller. Or rather, I am in love with the idea of being the kind of dad who would own such a stroller, the kind I have sometimes seen on hiking trails (on those rare weekends when I really do hike) or pushing past me at the beginning of a 5K road race – limber, chipper, brimming with good health and confidence. That’s the kind of dad I imagined myself becoming when my wife gave me the news that we were going to have a baby. The fact that the dad I actually am is this bleary, baggy-eyed person singing “Tiny Bubbles” or “Yellow Submarine” to my baby – for the fifth time – in my underwear at three in the morning while chain-guzzling cans of Diet Cherry Coke to stay awake is inconsequential.

Because with enough inspiration – and some sweet, sweet technology – I could still be that other dad.

Couldn’t I?

Well, no. For one thing, shopping for strollers has forced me to confront the fiction that I was making anything like an equal contribution to our son’s upbringing.

I can change all the diapers I want, read Baby all the “Goodnight (Insert Geographical Feature)” books I can find, or learn to feed him with a bottle, which turns out to be much more difficult than I had imagined. I could even (using my new stroller) push Baby up the slopes of Mount Tamalpais, or take him with me on a road race, ideally while listening to the “Music for Fatherhood” playlist I’ve been constructing on iTunes.

And I’d still be just the nights and weekends guy.

My wife is the one who gets up after a long, sleepless night with Baby and prepares herself for a long, sleepless day with Baby. I get to play with our child after coming home from work, but she has to figure out how to get in a day’s worth of online grading – and pay the bills, and do the laundry, and clean up whatever the cat has just yacked up in the living room – while feeding, diapering and soothing a screaming child. (Our son, though cute as the day is long, wakes up from every nap in a manner that resembles Martin Sheen’s hotel-room breakdown from the beginning of Apocalypse Now).

But I’m still his dad, and being his dad still means something to me. I’ve had a long time to think about the kind of dad I wanted to be: someone around whom my kids could feel completely relaxed, and yet someone who would always challenge them to try harder, to do better. A cross between Atticus Finch and Ricky Schroeder’s dad from Silver Spoons. Someone like my dad, in other words.

I’d never be the cool dad – I’ll never be the cool anything – but I thought I might at least be interesting. I looked forward to taking my kids to the zoo, to the beach, sharing the names of the stars with them, sitting up with them when they were afraid of the dark. I wanted to read stories to them. I wanted to make up stories for them.

So what happens if I’m not the kind of father my son wants or needs? He’s been pretty accommodating so far – he puts up with my rendition of “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay,” even though I can’t whistle, and he has sat through more readings of Is Your Mama a Llama? than I suspect the author’s own children have endured. On the other hand, he did not like the single story I have composed for him so far, a tale of the friendship between a boy and his tiger. (“He’s making the ‘This story blows’ face,” my wife reported, on the occasion when I tried to present it to him).

What if our son doesn’t want to be taken to museums and zoos and Presidential libraries? What if he likes football? Or death metal? Or the New York Yankees? What if he’s hyperactive and a little wild and needs the kind of father who will set clear boundaries for him, who will lay down the law with seriousness and a sense of purpose, rather than walking around telling jokes and singing songs about the cat?

Or what if he has more serious problems, the kind I haven’t even allowed myself to think about yet, let alone articulate in an essay?

The answer, I guess, is that I’ll keep doing what I’ve been doing so far, which is to be whatever kind of dad my son needs me to be. If he needs me to listen, I will. If he needs me to pretend to be interested in soccer, or Pokémon, or whatever nightmarish form of entertainment the Disney Corporation is currently cooking up for his future – I can do that. If he needs me to help him with his math homework, I will get down on my knees and thank God that one of my closest friends is a math professor.

And when I take him to the actual Disney World, and he has a head cold, or an ear infection, or he just isn’t feeling himself that day, and he’s miserable and obnoxious despite the fact that my wife and I will have spent half a year’s salary and flown clear across the country and endured heat, humidity and the insect population of Central Florida in order to give him this experience – I won’t snap. I might be upset with the situation, but I won’t be angry with him.

Because I will know exactly how he feels.