When my daughter was an infant, she had trouble keeping food down. As first time parents, my wife and I had no idea what a normal amount of baby spit was. So we were horrified when we discovered it wasn’t “everything she ate.” Because that’s what our daughter was spitting up: everything she ate, every time we fed her.
The doctors called it “reflux,” a phase that a lot of infants go through. To ensure she got the nutrition she needed, we would have to feed her more frequently.
As in, every single hour.
To meet demand, my wife and I slept in shifts. I would turn in at 8:00PM and take over from my wife at midnight. That meant I was spending a lot of unstructured time alone with the baby in the wee hours of the morning.
I'm not sure why, but I started creating videos during those quiet hours.
Exhibit A:
Exhibit B:
Exhibit C:
Overall, I think they hold up surprisingly well. I rarely laugh at my own jokes, but I actually found myself enjoying these. In retrospect, I was working through a lot of fear and the videos were how I made sense of those feelings.
Fear is a big part of parenting (at least, it is for me). At the time, I feared SIDS more than anything, but I was also afraid of how quickly and irrevocably my life was changing. I was giving up control. I was giving up my time, my peace, my health. I’d had a predictable life, and now I didn’t.
Watching them now, these videos feel like dispatches from a forgotten war. I see the sweat and the exhaustion and the thousand yard stare, and wish that I could reach through the screen and tell myself that it would all be okay.
Eventually, my daughter’s reflux subsided, our sleep schedule returned to normal, and the late night video shoots came to an end. It was a period of a few weeks, at most. But we’ll always have the videos we made together, a reminder of a strange and special time.
Hopefully, the first of many.
Finally, a bit of housekeeping:
I haven’t really established my Substack routine yet, so I wanted to take a moment to state my intentions.
As I said in my introduction, I intend to publish a portion of my fiction (approximately 2,000 words) every week. But I will also be publishing a weekly newsletter with no organizing principle. No theme. No objective. No word count. There may be art. There may be videos. There may be interactivity.
But there will be no rules.
This was the first such post.