Breakfast on the Beach
I’ve been a parent for three months, and perhaps the best way I can describe this new experience is that it breaks your heart in more places than you’d realized you had, and puts it back together, and then breaks it all over again. It breaks your selfishness, your complacency, your plans, your patience, and any lingering illusion that you have it all together. It breaks you when you start thinking about the span of life and how quickly it goes by, how fast this child will grow up, and how you want him to become independent but also don’t want him to ever change. It breaks you when you let your mind wander to the what-ifs, the worst case scenarios, and the stories you’ve heard about babies who are neglected or abandoned or abused. It breaks you when you want so badly to comfort your child when he’s upset, but you don’t know what’s wrong and sometimes you can’t handle his tears for a minute longer. And then he smiles at you, and coos, and for a few minutes you’re patched back up and fee
