Sam is eight-weeks old today.
At work, with friends and family, I seem to be getting a lot of questions with the same theme: "Is everything different now?" "Do you feel different?" "Do you see the world differently?"
Perhaps it's my natural contrarian instincts or maybe it's my aversion to discussing personal details of my life except by my own terms but my default response to this question is "no." I'm also somewhat confounded by these questions. I have never expected that a life change, even one as profound as having a child, alters who you are fundamentally as a person. I'm no expert, but character and personality development seem to be pretty set by the time you're 31 years old. I would have never asked that of anyone else and (even as a pretty judgmental person) I've never thought to judge a parent as different from a non-parent.
I have a hard time even expounding on my "no" answer. My stock answer has turned in to something like "I'm pretty domestic to begin with so it really hasn't changed my life much." And that's pretty true. I'm in to routine - I like to go to sleep at a specific time, wake-up up at a specific time, and eat at a specific time. Those times change ocassionally depending on what is going on during certain periods of my life, but I'm very regular. This hasn't been impacted much with Sam. In addition, we don't go out much at night. On weekends, Sara and I will rarely stay up past 11pm. Now, instead of reading books, I read them out loud and have to take occasional diaper change breaks.
The follow-up question typically is something along the lines of "Are you more tired than you've ever been?" or "is this the hardest thing you've ever done." I know people expect me to say "yes!" and then gush about how hard having an infant is. But I just can't do it. Sara and I seem to have a pretty good night time routine; Sam wakes up, I change him, bring him back to bed, and give him to Sara to feed. By now, Sam has gone from a feeding every two hours at night to one every 4 hours or so and seems to be well on his way to sleeping through the night. The last couple of nights we've put him down at 9 or 10, he's woken up around 2:30-3 and then again at 6 or 6:30. Not so bad (except for the nights that I have a hard time falling back asleep).
What's also helped is that after the HS Ultimate season last year, I added in morning workouts from June until Sam was born. I was budgeting about 2 hours a day for the work-out. I'd wake up at 6 be done and showered by 8 and at work by 9. Once Sam was born I cut-out the work-outs and just planned to sleep from 9 or 10pm at night until 8am. With 10 or 11 hours allocated for "sleep" waking up a few times didn't impact me too much. Now that Sara is back at work, I've had to add time in to take Sam to my Mom's place - but with Sam sleeping more it's been completely doable (asleep at 10pm, awake at 7am, leaving for for work at 8 and dropping Sam off on the way). I miss the work-outs but it's been an easy exchange to make.
But, over the past couple of weeks, I have started recognizing what is different. While I haven't changed and my perspective on life hasn't changed and I don't feel terribly tired or that raising Sam (so far) has been terribly hard work there is something that is new. I feel that there is a new fullness in my heart. It's strange to realize that. It's not that there was space there before - at least I didn't recognize that there was space there. But Sam has filled something. He's added density to my being.
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