What could I possibly learn in ninety minutes?

10:30am Sunday morning, not this week

Woke up an hour and a half ago

Enjoyed some delicious cuddles

Skimmed the NYTimes…Obama…Romney…blah blah…China…Europe…blah blah

Read a chapter of Here Comes Everybody…crowdsourcing…mobile-social…blah blah

Started to sketch out a powerpoint deck…white-space…blah blah

Interrupted deck sketching to discuss the most important issue of the day…

Where should we have brunch? Let’s go check out a new spot!

10:30am Sunday morning, this week

“Wake up” time has lost meaning, but we could go with 2am, 5am or 8am.

2am wake-cuddle-feed-burp-change-feed-swaddle-sleep cycle was rough. She had a tummy ache and nothing we tried seemed to console her. I think I felt my heart break every time she looked up at us, pleading for us to make it go away. She finally fell back asleep an hour and a half later, maybe because so much crying eventually tired out her little lungs, or maybe because just being held by mom eventually soothed her pain.

5am change was a little messy. Learned to swap out the changing mat from under her in the middle of the daiper change. Nobody told me that would be a required daddy skill or I might have practiced.

8am wake-cuddle-feed-burp-change-swaddle-sleep cycle ended with her lying on my chest, skin to skin, drifting gently in and out of sleep. Her needs were so basic, share the warmth of a body and hear the beating of a heart.

The next ninety minutes felt like an eternity, a place between thoughts, a time between days. I felt like my heart grew with every little breath she took, and I felt like maybe, just maybe, I had learned to accept unconditional love.

11 days in!

Am I having an identity crisis?

It’s been the most amplified four days of my life.

I used to think I was fearless. Then I watched my wife endure twenty one hours of contractions and fight her way through an hour and a half of pushing to bring our little baby into the world. To say I was “afraid” during labor would be like saying I was “happy” after delivery. Imagining the multitude of birth related complications that might arise and endanger my wife’s health, all of which were theoretically possible but statistically improbable, I was terrified. I experienced fear, true fear, for the first time in as long as I can remember.

I used to think I was graceful under pressure, level-headed and resourceful when sh*t hit the fan. That fantasy lies in a million little pieces on the floor of the hospital recovery room. The helplessness I felt that first night with our baby girl, not being able to console her as she seemed to struggle with her little breaths, was so foreign yet so intense. In the minutes before the nurse on-call arrived, I glimpsed a sense of helplessness so deeply that it felt molecular.

I used to think I was content, at least as content as a restless soul could hope to be. Then I experienced my first skin to skin contact with my baby girl, thirty six hours into her young life. I found a serenity that I could not have imagined possible. I wonder if Siddhartha would have left his newborn in search of enlightenment had he experienced the bliss of connecting with something (and someone) so pure.

I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror this morning while shaving, it was the first time I had seen myself in four days. I could barely recognize the person looking back at me. His confidence had been shaken, his sense of perspective toppled, his grounding uprooted, his history rephrased, his future recast.

And yet, it didn’t feel like a crisis. It felt more like an evolution. It felt awesome.

4 days in!