Just wait...
tends to be a common piece of, I wouldn’t call it advice, insight, perhaps, that I recieve when folks check in and hear that things are going well.
And things are going well with Roby. They aren’t going easily, but they are going well. If she were a dog this level of new responsbility would be a problem, but she isn’t a dog, she’s our daughter. The entirety of our lives has been tilted on its axis to now orbit this eight pound person. Resistance to that is the wellspring of discomfort.
It’s not sleep deprivation, I’m just newly polyphasic in my somnolence.
Things have been easy, because they’re important, what’s more they are necessary. This is something we’ve chosen with our whole hearts, and that makes it easy.
We listen to Roby, and we dance her dance. We sleep enough because of that.
When I tell people that it’s going well, that we’re sleeping enough, that it’s been fundamentally nothing but blissful pleasure and meaning-giving ascension, a common response is just to wait for it to become shitty when they can crawl, or call you an asshole, or fail at potty training, or some other step on the path to humanhood.
Imagine saying that to someone who enjoys their job.
“How’s the new job?”
“Oh it’s great.”
“Just you wait until you’re a grey old man who’s wife hates him and you get no recognition and everything’s shit and you just want to retire.”
That’s something you’ve got to work through yourself, goddamn. Not everything has to be shit. It reminds me of two things, the first is the stucco man I’ve written about before. The man who specialized in antique stucco, who hated dust. It’s like a glassblower who hates heat. A writer who hates words. A parent who hates sleeplessness and labor.
The second thing it reminds me of is a scene in News From Nowhere by William Morris. In this scene there are a group of men digging a ditch. They do it joyfully, sipping wine and chatting with their sweethearts.
Digging ditches is not fun, but for them, it is easy.
