A baby arrives and you’re not ready for it. Not completely. You knew she was coming, of course. You’ve had the idea of her in your mind for months. This imagined, amorphous concept of a baby, a tiny human swaddled in a white cloth blanket who smiles when you coo-coo at her, an idea pulled from your mind of “Baby.” But no one could have prepared you for the reality, the asteroid that slams into your peaceful planet and shifts its axis forever when a baby actually enters your life. Part of your particular disorientation is caused by the non-traditional manner of your baby’s arrival–though what’s really “traditional” anymore in this world of surrogates, IVF, test tubes, and soon enough, clones–which occurred through adoption, a fraught process for anyone who chooses it. There’s no gestation period with adoption, no waiting nine months, no planning. You just wait to hear the starting gun and then you start running. You have no idea how long you’ll be running or if there’s even a finish line. You just run until someone tells you to stop. Until you have a baby in your arms. And even then it’s potentially reversible. You may not be done running.
You’re a little surprised at how quickly and easily you adapt to adoption, to having a non-biological child instead of a biological one, to surrendering to the notion that your DNA will never be passed on, to extinguishing your family line on earth. After a few days of angst and having your procreation options limited by your partner at the time–your then-wife, now ex-wife–both by the infrequency of sex due to your declining emotional connection, certain physical realities, and her decision to take IVF off the table from the jump (something you were secretly happy about because of its immense expense and low percentage of success)–you find that you don’t care as much as you thought you would about having a biological child, a goal that some people obsess over and bankrupt themselves to achieve.
You feel this way for a couple of reasons. First, you find that you simply want to be a father and raise a child of your own. You don’t really care about the process that gets you there. A child is a child, and a father is a father. You want to experience fatherhood, with all its pains and joys. You want to experience raising a child in your own way, teaching him or her all the things you know, and ideally, how to navigate life better than you did, with less pain and trouble and more happiness and fearlessness. You selfishly want to pass on your loves and passions: music, reading, writing, sports, words, humor, sarcasm, social justice, equality, and fairness, the excitement of foreign travel, and a deep curiosity about the world. This is your true DNA, not how you look and sound. Most of all, you want to see if you can improve on the mess your parents made with you. You want to take the best of them (and you) and leave behind the worst of them (and you) and do better than they did with you. You want your chance at this, and it’s all you really care about. Not genes and biology. Fatherhood.
The second reason you are unconcerned about process is because you believe in reincarnation and a pre-scripted life, so you know that this isn’t your first rodeo. Indeed, you’ve likely had thousands of biological and adopted children already in prior lives, so none of this biological v. non-biological stuff other people obsess about matters very much to you. Deep down you know you’ve done both before and you will do both again. You also believe that you agreed to have this exact experience before you were born to teach you lessons you needed to learn and wanted to experience. So whichever baby enters your life–if any, because people can try to adopt for years and there’s no guarantee they’ll ever succeed–was predestined. He/she is a member of your soul family and an entity with whom you’ve experienced some of those aforementioned thousands of prior lives. So process is ultimately irrelevant to you.
This baby–a baby girl it turns out because you didn’t know her gender until the day she was born–arrives prematurely and with minimal warning. Lo and behold, she’s here a month earlier than you thought she would be. This means one less month to prepare, one less month to plan, one less month to assimilate to your new reality. It means new anxieties about your baby girl’s health because she’s in the NICU and you’re going to need time and a doctor’s approval to get her on a plane and bring her home. More time for the birth mother to change her mind. More time for new health issues to arise and keep you stuck thousands of miles away from where you live and the life you plan to make with your new daughter. More time to worry about everything that could go wrong.
They take her out of her NICU incubator for a few minutes so you can hold her for the first time, and it feels like you’re holding a miracle, a life-altering miracle. This tiny, wrinkled, red-faced, helpless baby girl swaddled in a white blanket with blue and pink stripes is yours. She will depend on you–her father–to keep her safe, protected, and supported in every way until the day you die. Or until the day you can’t do it any more. Your own father will be placed in assisted living within a year of you holding your new daughter, so you will come to understand, if you don’t already, that one day you may become as helpless and reliant as this baby girl you’re holding. Another job for you is to do everything possible to avoid this, but you know it’s not totally up to you, is it?
You bring her home. This helpless, totally vulnerable, completely reliant, tiny human who can’t even hold her own head up yet. This infant who doesn’t do anything except cry when she’s hungry, poop a manageable amount, and wake up five times in the middle of the night for a bottle. Unlike your own father, you alternate nights with your then-wife, now ex-wife, to get up to feed your baby girl, to swaddle her, change her, and rock her back to sleep. It bonds you to her and vice-versa, these exhausting, nightly experiences. You adapt to this new reality faster and more capably than you ever thought you would, but you’re a zombie for almost two years.
She grows. You teach her to talk and walk. You potty-train her with a little calendar that you save and still have. One day, while learning to walk in your kitchen she trips, falls, and chips a front tooth. Another day in her play room, she trips, falls, and hits her head on the front bar of a leather Paulistano designer armchair that you bought when you were single and lived in Williamsburg and still cared about interior design. The collision leaves a long, bluish indent on her forehead that almost makes you pass out. You and your then-wife, now ex-wife, frantically rush her to the emergency room where you’re told by a doctor that it’s going to be fine, her infant skull is still soft and growing, and it will work itself out, but keep an eye out for concussion for the next night or two. You exhale.
Your marriage, which was never on solid ground in the first place, deteriorates even more with her arrival because you’re both perpetually tired and even less patient with each other than before. Any flickers of physical affection that may have existed before your daughter’s arrival now disappear almost entirely. You’re having even less sex than you did before because you’re drifting apart and you’ve both discovered that you have a different idea of how you want the rest of your life to go. You’re learning that deep down, you are different people, people who communicate differently, show love differently, and experience joy and pain differently. Incredibly, even after waiting until your 40s to get married, even after having had several relationships with different women, even after going to therapy and learning a thing or two about yourself, it is slowly revealed that you’ve still managed to step into marital quicksand and get stuck in a deeply unhappy relationship that is quite similar to the one your parents had, give or take the nightly screaming and daily insults–a relationship devoid of affection, emotional connection, and partnership.
But now you have a daughter, so you try to make it work. At the age of three, you take your baby girl to pre-K for the first time. You found it yourself after researching and examining reviews and visiting other places for months, and you’re proud of this. Even your then-wife, now ex-wife thinks it’s a good place. When you drop your daughter off with strangers for the first time–a team of kind, loving, and patient older women who tell you that it’s going to be okay–your daughter bursts out crying when she sees you both leave. She goes to the daycare window as you and your then-wife, now ex-wife, walk to your respective cars, both of you crying yourselves. You feel gutted thinking about what your daughter must be feeling and thinking in that horrible moment, that she’s been abandoned by her parents and won’t see them again. A strangling fear. You think how this must even more damaging for an adopted child, who may being reliving an unconscious abandonment trauma that you will never understand.
You hate yourself. You feel like a failure, like you failed at fatherhood. You’re failing already, right here, right now. You didn’t protect your daughter from an emotional pain that was avoidable if you did what your then-wife, now ex-wife, wanted: let her stop working and raise your girl at home. But you don’t do that. You can’t afford to do that, not without major changes that you’re not willing to undertake because unlike your then-wife, now ex-wife, you’re always thinking long-term, not short-term. A stay-at-home parent wasn’t the plan you both made before you got married, and you’re not as interested as your then-wife, now ex-wife, in selling the dream house you just bought two years ago (with your own money of course, not hers) at a big loss after all the improvements you just made to it, not to mention all those closing costs, just so she can quit her job and stay home for two or three years until your daughter goes to the first grade. Doing this would be financial suicide for a temporary reason. You can put up with a sexless marriage and no physical affection from your spouse (at least for now). What you’re not going to do is destroy yourself financially. Certainly not for a marriage that appears to be dying no matter what you do to try and save it.
Still, you feel like a failure and a child-torturer every time you drop your daughter off to that daycare. You’re always relieved when you pick her up and she looks happy to see you. But your then-wife, now ex-wife’s resentment builds. It’s visible. She doesn’t hide it. You know she’s secretly blaming you for every tear, every ounce of your young daughter’s pain, and for her having to return to work instead of be with her daughter all day.
Time passes. Your daughter adapts. Makes friends. Cries less, then stops crying when you leave. You learn to sneak out when she’s occupied, and she knows you’re coming back. You start to think that maybe this forced socialization and independence at such a young age will be good for her in the long run. You think maybe it will make her less shy and more social than you were at her age. (Less shy and more social than you still are now.)
But your marriage gets worse. You’re roommates now, not partners. You don’t confide in each other. You go to bed at different times and sleep on opposite sides of the bed. You spend your weekends doing things on your own. You hide all of this from your daughter. Your only cordial moments together are with your daughter. You put a good face on it during birthday parties, social gatherings, family arrivals, but the home you made is slowly dying. You see this quite clearly in retrospect. You’re just different people. Your communication sucks. A baby didn’t help, other than to give you both a common purpose other than each other, a distraction from your unhappiness with each other for a while. You begin to travel alone. You welcome the solitude when she’s gone. It reminds you of the freedom and well-being you used to have before you got married, before you weighed yourself down with a lead necklace. One night, for no apparent reason, you just need to get out of that house, away from her, to breathe. You find yourself sitting in a plastic chair in the middle of your big garden in the backyard–a garden that was once thriving, producing cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce, flowers, and even pumpkins, but which is now barren and overgrown, a hilariously literal metaphor for your failing marriage. You look up at the sky and ask your dead father how you got here and what you’re going to do. You’re miserable, totally miserable, but you don’t want to blow up your life, your daughter’s life. Is this what marriage is like? Aren’t you supposed to work through things? Your parents were miserable, maybe they’re all like this on some level? Maybe emotional martyrdom just goes with the territory of relationships that were never intended to last this long except in movies?
Or maybe it’s just you. Your failure. Not everyone. Just you.
You decide to keep trying a little longer, keep being miserable a little longer, keep living separate lives a little longer. Of course, it doesn’t work. It takes two to tango, and you two are too far gone. A final, emotionally disastrous trip to the Dominican Republic cinches it. A trip where you find yourself with tears in your eyes at the breakfast bar one morning, where even your wife, now ex-wife, who never paid attention to you notices something’s wrong while holding your baby daughter. For a half-second you see a flash of empathy and concern on her face, that old look you used to see all the time, the caring look you fell in love with. Then, in a millisecond, it disappears, and her face morphs back into stone. It’s in that moment and one that came before it the day before, when you wished her a Happy Anniversary over a glass of wine, and she looked at you as if you were a stranger, that you know it’s over.
You agree to end your marriage when you get back. You agree to blow it all up. You’ve given up swimming upstream. You agree to break your three and a half year-old daughter’s life in half, to separate her parents for good. She entered the world with chaos and division, and now you and your then wife, now ex-wife, are affirmatively deciding to subject her to even more of both. A few months later, you take a photo of your daughter on your newly-renovated Trex wraparound porch, a porch that had cost you a pretty penny the year before, and which you definitely wouldn’t have fixed up had you known you were going to be separating from your then wife, now ex-wife within the next 365 days. Your daughter is posing in a navy blue dress with flowers, tilting her little head and wearing a big toothy smile that lights you up despite your misery. You get tears in your eyes as you take this photo because she’s so happy but doesn’t yet know what’s coming. She doesn’t realize the pain she’s in for. But YOU know. You know what’s coming because you’re the reason, the co-catalyst, for your daughter’s imminent pain, the pain of separating every day from one of the two people in the world who loves her more than anyone, and being forced to live with only one of them at a time. The pain of living in two homes for the rest of her life, with half of her possessions in one place, and half of them in another.
You print this photo, frame it, and have your daughter give it to your then wife, now ex-wife, for Mother’s Day, both because it’s one of the most beautiful photos you’ve ever taken of your daughter, and it’s a “Fuck You” to your then-wife, soon-to-be ex-wife for everything you both couldn’t make work and everything you both are in the process of destroying. Because no matter how much of a self-flagellating martyr you have made yourself in your own head, it’s her failure as much as it is yours, and you shouldn’t be the only one in tears every other night.
After four months, she moves to an apartment a few miles away in the same town. Her sister takes your daughter for the day, and you help her move her things into a U-Haul, which seems insane given the circumstances. One night a couple of weeks after her move, you drop your daughter off at your then wife’s, soon-to-be ex-wife’s apartment, spend some time with her, and tuck her into bed in her new bedroom. When turn to leave, your daughter understands what this means: she’s not going to see you for a few days. You will be absent from her life until further notice. Young kids don’t understand custody schedules. They just know that you’re leaving and won’t be there when they need you or want to see you.
As you reach her bedroom door, you hear her burst into tears and scream:
“Daddddddddddy!!!! Don’t leave, Dadddddy!! I want my Dadddddy!“
You turn around and you see her standing on her bed, red-faced and crying with her arms open. Her anguished cries and the traumatized look on her face split you in half. If you had any doubt that you were a failure as a father before, this cements it. This memory is so painful, so gutting, that you get tears in your eyes every time you think about it, even eight years later when you’re writing about it to complete strangers. You instinctively go back to her, take her in your arms, and hold her for five minutes with tears in your eyes until she calms down. Even your then wife, soon-to-be ex-wife, looks shocked and upset when she comes running into the bedroom. Once your girl is calmed down and tucked back into bed, you turn to leave. She sees you at her bedroom door and does the same thing again. You know she feels it all now, the reality of your separation and her broken family is hitting her full force. At your then-wife, soon-to-be ex-wife’s urging, you force yourself to leave your little girl screaming in her bedroom. You sit in your car in the parking lot and cry for five minutes. Never in your entire life you have never hated yourself more than in this moment. You also hate your then wife, and soon-to-be ex-wife for her contribution to your daughter’s pain. You didn’t think you were capable of hating someone like this, but here you are.
Ten minutes later, while you’re driving back to your big and empty house, your then-wife and soon-to-be-ex-wife texts you that your daughter has calmed down and is okay. You don’t believe her.
A year later, you sell your beautiful, three-bedroom dream house with the built-in pool, dead garden, newly-renovated wrap-around porch, and two acres of land because you can’t afford to stay there on your own income–you never could–and it’s too big to live in alone anyway. Unlike your then-wife, soon-to-be ex-wife, you don’t ask her to help you pack or move. You have too much pride for this, and you’re way too angry, so you do it all yourself. At the age of 50, the mid-century mark, a time when you thought you’d be in a far different place than you are now, you leave that dream house for the last time without looking back and move into a two-bedroom apartment in a small city 25 miles south. It’s a stark regression, and the word “failure” doesn’t even cover it. This definitely wasn’t the plan, but what did John Lennon say? Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans?
Your daughter adapts. Grows. Her little mind makes room for two houses and separated parents who have little to say to each other. You try to replace the bedroom and life she had before as best as you can in the limited space you have now. Eventually she gets old enough to ask pointed questions. Why do you and Mommy live in separate places? Why can’t you live together? Why do you never hug each other when you see each other? When are we going to live together again? Why can’t we live in one house? It’s all a process of adaptation. It takes years, and it’s incredibly bittersweet watching her adapt to her new life and forget her old one. She begins to forget her prior life as a family under one roof. Your dream house, a house you refuse to return to and never will, doesn’t even register to her now except as a wispy memory. She was too young. You read books and articles on how to make this divorce easier for her. To answer her incessant questions that pester you like sand flies, you tell her the “ice cream and pizza” metaphor: Daddy is ice cream and Mommy is pizza, and they really don’t taste good together. You can’t eat pizza with ice cream on it, right? Do you understand? She looks at you like you’re nuts.
Your ex-wife meets someone and eventually moves in with him. Your six year-old daughter initially is confused by your ex-wife’s new relationship, which seems rushed to you but not at all surprising for someone who can never be alone for very long. You’re forced to explain to your daughter why this new person is always around because communication and long-term thinking are not your ex-wife’s strong suits. Here is what ‘special friend’ really means, love.
A year and a half later, you unexpectedly meet someone yourself and fall in love. Your daughter takes to this person in a way that surprises you and makes you happy. When she visits you, your daughter wants a piece of her too, which is the best you could hope for. They get along really well, and you’re happy that your daughter is being exposed to a woman who is so different from her mother: patient, grounded, positive, emotionally supportive, and visibly affectionate towards her father. You travel together to Pensacola, where your daughter meets her same-aged son for the first time. They take to each other and become friends in a way that also delights you. There’s a moment in the rental car when they’re eating ice cream in the backseat and the four of you are singing a song that came on the radio, carefree and laughing–a fleeting moment that’s as good as this life gets–and you feel this immense joy and start thinking about the four of you being together in one place for good. You travel together to Italy, just the three of you this time, your daughter and your then-girlfriend, now ex-girlfriend. You see them hold hands as they walk together ahead of you. You see how attached your daughter is to this person, how much she likes her and enjoys spending time with her. This makes you happy and you start thinking more about the future you want and hope to create.
Your relationship ends within months of this trip. You don’t tell your daughter right away. You’re not eager to impose more loss on her life. Eventually she asks where this person is, why she hasn’t come to visit, why you haven’t gone to visit her. You make excuses. Dissemble. Wait for your daughter to forget this person. Over time, she does and she doesn’t. When you feel like enough time has passed, you break the news to her in passing over dinner one night. She tells you that she already figured this is what happened, but you can tell by the look on her face that it still hurts. She asks if she will ever see your ex-girlfriend again, and you tell her “maybe, but probably not,” knowing the real answer is “No.” She’s still in touch with your ex-girlfriend’s son through her iPad. They’re still friends and you let it be because it’s the right thing to do, and there’s no reason to create more pain for her. It’ll solve itself over time one way or the other. Your daughter refuses to let you throw out the Louisiana glass tumbler you bought as a souvenir on a holiday trip to your ex-girlfriend’s home state the year before. You’d prefer it be gone, but your daughter thinks it’s special because it reminds her of your ex-girlfriend and her son so you let her keep it. Eventually you make that glass a running joke. She still has it. You resolve to yourself to be more careful in the future about introducing her to people. To not expose her to someone until you’re sure about where things are headed. Or as sure as you can be. She’s not a baby any more – she notices more and feels more. Anyone who enters your life enters her life too. You need to be smarter about things like this, and you will be.
Little kids, little worries, big kids, big worries, that’s what your mother always said, and she’s right. Now your little girl isn’t a little girl any more. For years, you walked her to school, holding her little hand, and talking about whatever was on her mind. Now, she walks to middle school alone, with headphones that you tell her not to wear while she’s walking, or at least keep one off so she can keep an eye out for cars and potential kidnappers in white vans or wearing friendly faces. She loves music, and you know you had a lot to do with this because her mother’s not a big music buff and primarily listens to country, which she hates. You go to concerts and musicals together–Olivia Rodrigo, Glass Animals, Chappell Roan, Michael, Wicked. You see movies together. You still remember the first one you took her to: Coco, when she was five. You fight fruitlessly to minimize her screen time and all that addictive dopamine triggering, which will result in God knows what in 20 years. It’s a losing battle.
Now you can see slivers of the woman she’s going to become in the tween/teenager she currently is. She’s her own person, starting to separate from you but still needing you. She says she’s going to put herself to bed, but she invariably calls to you ten minutes later to “tuck her in,” which really means be with her to talk with her about whatever’s on her mind like you’ve always done, in the safety of her bedroom before she falls asleep. This used to happen at 8:30, then 9:00, then 9:30 pm. Now it happens at 10:30 and closer to 11:00 pm, which is a real thorn in your ass because you’re almost 58 and sleep is almost as compelling as sex now. You go every time, no matter how tired you are, because it’s the only solitary, quiet, emotionally vulnerable time you get with her now on the days you have her, and you know the day is coming when she won’t want to do it any more.
She calls you “Unc” and “Bruh.” “Daddy” is now “Dad.” She occasionally complains about her body and compares it to those of other girls. You do your best to build her confidence and tell her that she is just fine the way she is and needs to love herself as she is and not worry about other people. You try to redirect her negative energy into something positive and productive. You show her how to lift weights and buy her some light ones for Christmas. You show her how to do planks and squats and walk on your treadmill. She rejects it initially but you soon find that she’s exercising on her own and seems to like how it makes her feel. She’s independent and opinionated like both of her parents, which sometimes causes friction with friends at school. She’s not a clique type of girl, or one who will adapt to a crowd just to fit in or to appease the needy, possessive, or selfish. At her age, being your own person can lead to ostracization. She doesn’t always understand the reactions she gets. Because she’s always around adults, in some ways she’s more mature than girls her age, but in some ways she isn’t and her expectations are too high. She sometimes expects girls her age to treat her the same way adults do, and this isn’t realistic. She apologizes when she makes a mistake but finds that other girls her age don’t, and she’s tired of it. She eventually separates from some of her old friends and for a few weeks, finds herself isolated socially and sitting at lunch alone or with people she barely knows. You remember middle school and how isolated you felt at times, how you were sometimes abandoned by supposed friends. It’s a difficult age. You feel her pain. You listen and try to give advice while doing your best not to be a helicopter parent. She calls you that anyway.
She loves you. You’re close and very much alike. You feel all of this. But she’s also her own person. She’s bright and intuitive. She calls out your flaws and hypocrisy whenever she sees them, and it makes you laugh when she’s right. You’re proud of her and miss her when she’s not around. She’s one of your favorite people. She gives your life purpose and meaning and makes some difficult decisions easy: like surrendering your freedom of choice and mobility and living in a two-bedroom rental in a town you wouldn’t have chosen for yourself. You strain against the frustrating fact that you probably won’t own another house until you’re 63, but this is mostly fine with you because your daughter has a home base and this is the least you can give her after all the upheaval she’s experienced in her young life. One validating fact is that your ex-wife is now on to her second serious boyfriend since your divorce and will soon be making yet another move because they just got engaged and will be married in two months. You’ve made your share of mistakes in life, but insisting that your daughter remain in the school district you’re currently exiled in was not one of them. Had you not done so, your daughter likely would have been forced to move to two different schools by now, and God knows where she’d be emotionally. You saw this coming seven years ago, and you handled it.
There are no guarantees of course. As the past year has shown, staying put in this town does not guarantee stability or perpetual social happiness. Not to mention you are entering some potentially turbulent teenage years where you can only hope that things you’ve taught your daughter so far and the father you’ve been to her until now will allow her to make good choices in pivotal moments when you’re not going to be there. Now the biggest job for you as a father is to not only protect her from the world and herself, it’s to raise her so that she doesn’t need you any more. It’s to make yourself obsolete.
There will be parties with alcohol or drugs, peer pressure, private messages you don’t see, things she doesn’t tell you, secrets she keeps, fair weather friends, boyfriends with all this brings, all kinds of temptations, and a car to drive. Your job is to be there for her through all of it, for better or worse. You know you will be because it comes naturally to you. In some ways this makes it simple, but none of this is simple. You’re just grateful to have her in your life, to have been blessed with the experience of fatherhood, with all its laughter, pain, pride, failure, tears, and hope for the future.
You’re grateful you agreed to this script. You wouldn’t change any of it. Not one second.
