Can I Be a Dad AND a Mountain Hero?

In some of the more romantic fantasies I’ve had of how my life might look, I envision myself standing on a mountaintop, triumphant after a long struggle, the camera slowly zooming out with some dramatic music in the background, maybe rotating a little bit as if the footage was being shot from a helicopter, showing an ocean of mountains surrounding the summit I was standing upon.

I have been fortunate to have put myself in that actual fantasy, in mountains all over the Lower 48, and a few in Europe. Sometimes I’ve had skis attached to my feet, sometimes a climbing rope is coiled and draped over my backpack, and sometimes a pair of running shoes are the most technical thing I’m wearing. Every time I do it, it’s a dream come true.

I never dreamed about pushing a one-year-old baby around in a Target shopping cart, him facing me, calmly taking everything in, swiveling his head 180 degrees to look at the bright objects on the shelves and the people walking by, as we roll from the baby formula aisle to the Fritos aisle to the toilet paper aisle. I hand Jay an unbreakable item to hold onto as we cruise, a plastic tube of puffed something or other crunchy things for babies, and he understands the importance of his job, gripping it with both tiny little hands, and hey, do you want to see a 10-second video of my kid holding onto a thing while he sits in a Target shopping cart? Because let me tell you, I have more than one of them. I have somehow become a guy who takes videos of his kid in a shopping cart in Target and videos like this now outnumber photos of me on mountain summits, and I have watched them all at least five times.

I said something like: Oh, no, I don’t like kids.

Which was true. I mean, I don’t dislike kids—I’m not the guy on the airplane sighing loudly and staring at the parents with the crying baby. I just prefer to hang out with adults. We have more in common, they throw less food at me, and are usually less prone to outbursts that interrupt conversation.

I thought of something our friend Kelly said once: “People ask, ‘Do you like kids?’ No, I don’t like ALL kids. I don’t like all adults. Why would I like all kids?”

I told Katie: “I guess I’m hoping it will be different when it’s my own kid?”

Around that same time, Rivka Galchen’s book Little Labors made the journey from Hilary’s bedside table to my bedside table, and in the middle of reading it, I encountered a passage about people like me—or, rather, guys like me:

Looking back at my list of questions, it’s clear that I was a little anxious about the whole thing.

I mean, I don’t ever want to carry a 40-pound pack, but when I lift up a 40-pound backpack to put it on, I start saying things like, “Are you sure we need a bear canister/tent/food?” But in pregnancy, that weight is mostly on the front, and Hilary has confirmed that it was more pleasant to hump a 40-pound backpack across the Wind River Range than have a fetus and placenta jammed up against her digestive organs and lungs. If she were to sign up for one of those GoRuck events, her normal body weight would only require her to carry 20 pounds.

On July 3, she woke up at 5 a.m. with contractions, and was determined to spend as much time in labor at home as possible, so she walked around the house, sat at the kitchen table, sat on the backyard deck, in general discomfort punctuated by contractions every hour or so, a sensation I will never personally experience. At 3:45 p.m., still no baby, so I went for a 3-mile run around our neighborhood, carrying my phone and staying within a half-mile of the house. At 6:35, we finally left for the hospital. Before we got out of the car, I took one last photo of our family of two, before we became a family of three. Turns out there was no rush on that photo.

In everything I read about childbirth, and all the people I talked to about it, there appeared to be somewhat of a spectrum of How Things Might Go At The Hospital:

In adventure terms, it can be pretty similar to the Three Types of Fun:

As is the case in adventures, things can also go way past the Type 3 Fun end of the scale into tragedy, which no one plans on or wants. A couple months before our due date, someone told me, “As long as you go home with a healthy baby and a healthy mom, you win.”

The delivery room was dark, lit by a few machines and the battery-powered candles our doula, Cerise, had brought. Instead of a playlist of songs on one of our phones, we listened to the YouTube audio from old Major League Baseball Games of the Week from the 1980s, which was kind of the perfect white noise, and would not taint any of our favorite songs with bad memories of, say, a long labor, which is what we got.

The first photo I took of Jay was at 4:55 p.m. on July 4th, in a room full of people who had just come together with the efficiency of an Indianapolis 500 pit crew to anesthetize, stabilize, and incise Hilary, pull out a baby, and then stitch Hilary back together again, handing me a four-minute-old human so I could theoretically keep him safe for the next twenty minutes of his life, which was also the longest I’ve ever held a baby in my entire life. I kept looking around wondering who put me in charge, but no one seemed worried, so I just kept talking to him and hoped he wouldn’t cry too much because I wouldn’t know what to do. In the computer, his name was Jay, decided upon by two parents who had spent their entire lives correcting people who spelled their names wrong. Hope you like it, kid. You can change it when you turn 18. Or when you turn five, really, it’s up to you.

We went home from the hospital four days after Jay’s birth, and Hilary of course was not supposed to go up or down stairs, or even really leave the bed much, for several days. We had a brand-new human who would cry when he was hungry, when he had peed his pants, when he was tired, without any regard to what time of day it was or how little sleep his parents had gotten in the past 24 hours. It was sort of like crewing for someone running an ultramarathon, except ultramarathons are usually finished by the end of the weekend.

People say, “You have to sleep when the baby sleeps,” but then in the morning, you feel like you should drink a bunch of coffee to wake up, and when the baby goes down for its first nap, you’re wired and can’t sleep, and also, when the baby is sleeping, you finally have a chance to get stuff done, like answer some emails, run to the grocery store, or scrub diaper blowout liquid feces out of tiny baby clothes with blue Dawn dish soap and peroxide, I am a fucking expert at this now. And then the baby is awake again so you drink more coffee, and so on.

After a few weeks of rapidly aging, losing brain cells, and forgetting how to do everyday tasks, Hilary presented me with the nine most beautiful words anyone has ever said to me: “Why don’t you go sleep in the guest bedroom?” Her rationale was that there was no reason for both of us to be completely trashed by sleep deprivation when only one of us could actually soothe the baby—since he was refusing to take a bottle so far—and I should get a night of rest.

I did just that, and it was incredible. I felt guilty, like I was cheating on my wife. I was not. I was just getting seven and a half hours of consecutive sleep for the first time in months.

You may have seen a movie in which the lead character puts their own life on the line to save someone else, jumping in front of a bullet, or otherwise sacrificing themselves so that their loved one or loved ones may continue living. That’s nice and all, but most of us are never going to be in a situation like that. If you don’t have the chance to shove Ben Affleck out of the airlock so you can take on the suicide mission of blowing up the asteroid yourself, a la Bruce Willis in Armageddon, please allow me to gently suggest that you should focus on something more realistic but equally heroic, such as enabling your spouse to sleep. That’s love. Or one way to love, anyway.

A 2015 study found that people who were sleep deprived were 4.5 times more likely to sign a false confession.

We figured it would not help to throw our hands up and scream, “How much longer can this go on????,” but instead, to just focus on what was right in front of us. My friend Ed, who has, like me, run a few ultramarathons, suggested the metaphor of just getting yourself to the next aid station: Don’t think about it as running 100 miles. Just run the next five miles to the next aid station, and the next seven miles to the next one, and so on. Just get the little guy to the next nap time, and the next feeding, and the next nap time after that.

So when I talked to people about having a baby and they said, “I love my kids,” or “my relationship with my kids is a completely different kind of love,” I still didn’t know what they meant. Or how I might feel about having a kid. So far, though, the best definition, in my opinion, came from my friend Mike, who was quoting Dan Harris, author of Ten Percent Happier, who was quoting someone else, who said something like: “You don’t care for something because you love it. You love something because you care for it.”

A year later, I have indeed lost time. Or, more accurately, my time is going somewhere else. One friend I interviewed, in response to that question, said: It’s not that you had more time before you became a parent—it’s that you have no idea how inefficient you were with your time.

I am technically self-employed, or a freelancer. I feel fortunate to be in this situation right now, to be able to work from home, or be able to shuffle my schedule around in order of priorities, i.e. do I absolutely need to sit at a desk and write something for the internet RIGHT NOW or can I sit on the floor and make sure the baby doesn’t pull a bookshelf down on his head and/or lick the bottom of those boots and/or pull an extension cord far enough out of an outlet that it still conducts electricity but also has enough room for a baby finger to slide in between the prongs?

I guess inside me there are two wolves:

This guy with two wolves does a lot of work after 7:00 p.m. on weeknights, and on weekends.

When talking to my friend Glen, I worried aloud a little bit about how having a young child to take care of was going to affect my career as an adventure writer, when I would probably have much less time for adventures for a few years. He said: “Your life’s an adventure. You’ll figure it out.”

In other words:

Kurt Vonnegut, from Hocus Pocus:

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

Or, Ronnie Coleman:

Everybody wanna be a bodybuilder but don’t nobody wanna lift no heavy ass weight.

I thought he was being a little pessimistic, but a decade-plus later, I think I finally get what he was saying. You think you’ll have more time later to finish a climb you bailed off of, or spend a couple more days at an alpine lake, or run a trail again. The mountain will most likely be there for a while, much longer than any of us, but you might never get back there again for whatever reason, life happens, and you have to look back on that one trip and be grateful you had those days there with your friends, back when you didn’t know it would be the only time.

Now, as a new parent, I’m always aware that this is a one-time deal for us—each time something happens for the first time, it’s the only time we’re going to go through it. There’s something bittersweet about that, but it also forces me to be present, to put my phone down so I don’t miss it, whatever Jay does that day that we’ll probably forget about in two weeks but right now seems like the most exciting thing in the world.

Am I now, officially, one of those people who goes completely batshit while watching their baby learn to clap its hands together for the first time? Yes, I became that person a few weeks ago. Look, I have a pretty great life, but like most people around my age in the internet era, many of my days can feel a bit like the same thing over and over, or a to-do list I never finish, and some days, there’s not a lot of novelty. But now I have a roommate who had, as of very recently, never been down a slide before, and although the Little Tikes Easy Store Large Slide my parents bought him has only about a three-foot drop over its five feet of length, providing maybe one half-second of actual quasi-flight feeling, well, let me tell you. I would love to be some sort of Big Deal and/or Change The World and/or create A Piece Of Art That Defines A Generation or something like that, but I have zero fucking problem right now with a one-year-old’s delight at going down a slide being the best part of my day.

I know there’s going to be a day, hopefully not very soon, when Jay doesn’t just smile at me with absolutely pure joy, no reservations, no awareness of any reason he shouldn’t just smile with his entire body. So I’m trying to be here now. Even if we’re just having a chill time in a shopping cart in a big box store.

Jay turned one year old this month, and I couldn’t believe we’d made it a year. I thought of a question I should have asked all the dads I interviewed: Did it ever start to feel like you knew what you were doing? But I think I already know the answer to that.