The first day home from the hospital with baby Katelyn shows just how good of a dad joe already is.
The drive home is slower than the drive there.
Joe takes every turn like the car is made of glass. Like the roads are new. Like he has never in his life operated a vehicle and is only now understanding the stakes involved.
You watch him check the rearview mirror for the sixth time in four minutes and don’t say anything, because honestly, you’re doing the same thing.
Your twisting in the passenger seat every thirty seconds to look at Katelyn in her car seat, who is asleep, who is completely fine, who does not know that her parents are running on three hours of combined sleep and approximately forty percent of their usual cognitive function.
He checks the mirror again.
The apartment smells like the candle your best friend must have lit and then extinguished before leaving. It’s a welcome-home instinct, a good one. Someone has put flowers on the kitchen counter, tulips, pale pink, with a card that you don’t read yet because you are focused entirely on the task of getting inside.
Joe sets the car seat down on the living room rug and crouches in front of it and just looks at her for a second.
“So she’s here now,” he says.
He looks up at you. There’s something on his face that isn’t quite fear and isn’t quite awe. It’s the specific expression of a person standing at the edge of something enormous, squinting into it, trying to take the measure of it.
Then he reaches out and unbuckles Katelyn from the seat with the focused care of someone defusing something, lifts her against his chest, and stands up.
“Cool,” he says. “Cool.. Great. We’re fine. This is fine.”
Katelyn sleeps through all of it.
The first feeding is 11 p.m.
You hear her before the monitor even catches up . It’s some new frequency your body has apparently tuned itself to without asking, some biological thing.
You’re already sitting up when Joe stirs beside you.
“I’m up,” he says, which is either a lie or an aspiration; his eyes are still closed.
“I’m up,” he says again, and this time he actually opens his eyes, and pushes himself to sitting with the slow determination of a man operating on will alone.
His hair is going in four directions. He looks like he lost a fight with the pillow. He gets up anyway.
You nurse Katelyn in the chair in the corner of her room. The pale pink room, the one that still smells faintly of paint under the lavender of the plug-in diffuser.
Joe sits on the floor with his back against the wall, knees pulled up, watching.
“You don’t have to sit here,” you tell him.
“I’m aware of that option, yeah.”
He pulls his knees up a little more and tips his head back against the wall. In the soft glow of the nightlight he looks young and rumpled and very awake.
“Good. Good, that’s— yeah.” He nods like this is useful information he will file away. Then: “How are you?”
The question lands differently than you expected.
Not “are you okay” which you’d have deflected without thinking, but “how are you,” which opens a door you’re not sure you’re ready to walk through— Especially at 11pm in a lavender-scented room with your daughter attached to your chest and your body feeling like a stranger’s.
“Tired,” you say, which is true but not the whole truth.
“Yeah? What else, baby?” he asks, quiet.
You look down at Katelyn. Her eyes are closed. Her fist is curled against your skin.
“I don’t know yet,” you say honestly. “I think I need a few days to figure out what’s me being tired and what’s something else.”
He doesn’t push. He doesn’t offer a solution or talk you out of the feeling or make it smaller.
He just nods, slow, and says: “Okay. Tell me when you know. Or when you don’t know. Either way.”
“Okay,” you say smiling faintly.
Katelyn makes a small sound. A rearrangement of herself. Something that communicates, in the universal language of newborns: I’m still here. Pay attention.
“Yeah, yeah,” Joe tells her from the floor. “We see you.”
You hear them through the monitor, a small mercy, he’s taken her to the living room so you can sleep. You lie in bed for a few minutes in the dark just listening.
“Okay,” Joe is saying. “Okay, I hear you. I hear you. I don’t know what you want me to do about it, but I want you to know that I’m listening.”
Katelyn, undeterred, continues.
“Is it the swaddle? I feel like it’s the swaddle.” A pause. “I redid the swaddle. That was.. okay, that’s not it.” Another pause, longer. “What if I—here. Here, how’s that.” The volume dips. “There you go. See? See? We figured it out.”
“Don’t look at me like that. I have no idea why that worked either.”
You smile at the ceiling. You’re asleep within four minutes.
4 a.m. you’re up again before he can get to her, and this time something is different. You can’t name it exactly it’s a thickness behind your eyes, a weight that isn’t just physical.
You sit in the chair with Katelyn and the tears come without warning, without narrative, without any cause you can identify. They just arrive. Quiet and steady.
You’re not scared. You’d read about this. You’d been told. But knowing a thing is coming and having it arrive are different things. You sit in the pale pink room at 4 a.m. and cry without entirely knowing why, with Katelyn in your arms, both of you in her nightlight’s glow.
Joe appears in the doorway at some point. You don’t know how long he’s been there.
He comes in and doesn’t say anything immediately, just crouches in front of you, elbows on his knees, and looks at your face.
“Hi.” Your voice comes out wrecked. “Sorry. I don’t.. I’m not sad, I think. I don’t know what this is.”
“You don’t have to know what it is.”
“Don’t.” He says it simply, without force, and reaches out to tuck a strand of hair behind your ear. “You just had a baby. You can cry.”
“I cried in the shower earlier too.”
“Because you didn’t ask me to come in.” He says this matter-of-factly, no edge to it. “But I stayed outside the door.”
“The whole time?” you ask.
You breathe. It goes a little ragged in the middle and smooths out at the end.
“I feel like my body isn’t mine right now,” you say, slowly, testing the words as they come out. “Like I’m borrowing it from someone and I don’t know the terms of the lease.”
He takes that in. Doesn’t try to fix it.
“That sounds really disorienting,” he says.
“It is.” You look down at Katelyn, who has fallen back asleep against you, completely unbothered.
“She has no idea. That’s wild to me. She has absolutely no idea.”
“She knows you,” Joe says. “Apparently that’s like, the first thing they figure out. Your voice. Your smell.” He pauses. “I looked it up at earlier.”
“I’ve looked up a lot of things tonight.”
He lists them on his fingers. “Why babies hate being put down. Whether it’s normal if they make that noise.. the kind of like, pterodactyl noise—”
“I know, I found that out. Also the best swaddle technique, which I’ve now watched a video on five times, and I think I’ve cracked it. And also..”he pauses. “Whether postpartum stuff can start right away or if it takes longer.”
“I wasn’t going to bring it up,” he says, “unless you did. But I wanted to know what to look for.”
You look at him for a long moment.
“You’re going to be really annoying about being good at this, aren’t you.”
He huffs. Looks away. But his mouth does the thing it does when he’s trying not to smile. “I mean. I wouldn’t use the word annoying.”
Morning comes in sideways through the curtains, that specific pale gold of early spring.
Katelyn is in the bassinet, Joe had moved her because he said he “needed to watch her.” She’s actually sleeping, which she has been doing for a full forty-seven minutes, which is, as far as you are both currently concerned, an extraordinary achievement.
You are in bed. Joe has brought coffee, which you can only have a cautious amount of. He’s sitting up against the headboard with his mug, reading something on his phone.
You’re lying with your head on his leg, not sleeping but you’re not awake either. You’re in a soft middle place, the one that only exists when you feel completely safe.
The morning light is catching the side of his face. There’s a crease from the pillow still on his cheek. He’s been awake for most of the last seventy-two hours and he is smiling at a texts from his sisters about his new daughter like it’s the best thing that’s happened to him all week.
“Thank you,” you say. “For this week. For all of it.”
“You don’t have to thank me.”
He sets the phone down and his hand finds your hair, easy and unhurried.
“I’m exactly where I want to be,” he says. Simply. Like it isn’t even a complex thing.
From the bassinet, Katelyn makes the pterodactyl noise.
Joe is up before you can move, crossing the room in three steps, leaning over her with his hands braced on the sides of the bassinet.
“Good morning,” you hear him say. “Look who’s awake. Look at you.”
“You slept forty-seven minutes,” he tells her.
“That’s really good. I’m proud of you, babygirl.”
You put the pillow over your face. You are smiling so hard your cheeks hurt.
“I know, I know,” he’s saying. “You’re hungry. Okay. Here—” and then the sound of him picking her up, the familiar recalibration of his voice going softer, “here we go. I’ve got you. Let’s go get your mama.”
He comes back to the bed with her and deposits her gently into your arms, then gets back in beside you. You nurse her in the morning light with your head tipped against his shoulder and his arm around you both.
Outside the city is starting up, people are on their way to work, tabloids about Katelyn are starting to make the round, the tulips on the counter are probably past their peak by now, and none of that matters even slightly.
Katelyn eats. Joe steals a sip of your coffee because he already finished his. You let him.
“She’s got your nose,” he says, for what is probably the eighth time since she was born.
You look down at her. At the small perfect unfathomable fact of her.
The morning holds. The three of you stay still inside it.
@watercolorskyy (tags are open!!)
