What I’ve learned in my first three months as a parent

Three months ago, I told my boss, “That’s it. I’m not coming into work anymore.” And I haven’t, except on one occasion to pick up the plant on my desk. But in a few days I’ll be headed back to work because today my son turns three months old, and I’ve exhausted the generous parental leave policy at Microsoft. Three months without (normal) work! I can hardly believe it. The days have been long, and often blurred together over consecutive sleepless nights. But the weeks have gone by quickly, and I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to bond with my son, to teach him linear algebra and integral calculus. We have played catch and gone skiing. He’s even taken up the piano and mastered a few pieces by Tchaikovsky. All this, and he barely weighs twelve pounds!

Ok, most of that isn’t true.

The truth is this: he spends most of his time eating and sleeping and listening to audiobooks, which have been great because, well, for one, he can’t read yet, and more importantly, neither can I when I’ve got one hand holding a bottle in his mouth and the other supporting the back of his head. The pages aren’t going to turn themselves.

Of all the advice I had received before fatherhood about becoming a new dad, it was never explained to me and has therefore surprised me a great deal that time spent caring for a newborn is almost entirely spent feeding him, and this is especially true during the first few weeks. Just look at the numbers: he eats every three hours, around the clock. That’s eight times per day and about 40 minutes for each feeding session on average. That’s 320 minutes per day, or about 37 hours — almost a full-time job’s worth — per week. Split between his mother and me, that’s about 200 hours I’ve spent simply feeding my son while on parental leave. And this means we’ve listened to quite a few audiobooks.

We most recently finished Christopher Hitchens’s memoir, HITCH-22, which I found full of surprises and insights about being the parent of a young boy, including the legacy and fate of Hitchen’s mother, Yvonne, which is narrated in the first chapter of the memoir.

I won’t spoil it.

The scene that stuck with me the most was his recollection of the time he’d spent with Jorge Luis Borges, who was nearing the end of his life when he met Hitch, nearly blind, and implored Hitch to stay longer than the few days he had scheduled and to continue reading aloud for his sake. When Hitch insisted that he must go, Borges finally relented and told Hitch he would only then recite a few lines before he left, and that Hitch that he would never forget them.

What man has bent o’er his son’s sleep, to brood. How that face shall watch his when cold it lies? Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes, Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?

What man? I am a father three months, and I am already that man, and those lines, written by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, are now stuck with me as well. For now at least, they have inspired me to continue writing for my son’s sake and for my own, to document our lives and his youth. If I don’t put these experiences down in writing, will he ever know they happened? Or else, who will remember these last three months when I’m lying cold?

The best three months of my life.