The Little Magic of being dad

They’re true, for the most part, all the cliches of parenthood.

Sleep is a grind. Raising a newborn is both the most difficult and, for intangible reasons that are impossible to explain, the most rewarding thing you’ll ever do. For some inexplicable reason, you can just sit and stare at your baby, like a flame, for hours on end, and not tire of it.

They’re all true, save for one, for me, anyway: That the moment your child is born is the moment you discover a new capacity for love, one that you didn’t think possible. It is a decidedly magical moment. Big Magic.

“Nothing like it,” Scott Van Pelt wrote to his good friend and now fellow ESPN personality Pat McAfee when McAfee’s daughter was born. “Wild to be introduced to a mighty love that you never knew was in you – then there it is. Bigger than the world.”

Mark Burik, a good friend of mine whose daughter was born eight days after my son, wrote something similar: “It’s hard to describe how Everything she is and Everything we feel so we won’t try. We’ll just love Baby Mack with Everything we have.”

I kept waiting for the Big Magic to happen, for the moment my soul opened itself up to that new cavernous level of love new parents evidently experience on the regular.

It never did.

The only emotion I can really recall feeling is relief. Relief that Delaney was OK, that Austin, who emerged silent and purple and stuck, was breathing.

Relief that it was over.

I’d rank the day Austin was born as the second worst day of my life, behind only the day good friend Eric Zaun — Austin’s middle name is Zaun — died. Delaney’s labor was long and hard and, with no epidural, positively brutal. To see the person you love most in life go through something like that, with no way to ease the pain or really help in any tangible way, is a bit traumatic, to be honest, and now her mother and I are forever bonded by that. We knew, of course, that if she went no epidural, which was the plan, it wouldn’t be a pleasant experience. But I’m not sure there’s much that can prepare you for that, both her and I. A few ladies in church have joked that epidurals are God’s gift to women. After April 18, I’d argue they’re as much God’s gift to husbands.

I loved my son. At least, I thought I did. I was supposed to, anyway. He’s my kid, after all. But a father forming a relationship with a newborn, who is little more than a noisy blob, was far more difficult than I imagined. I was under no false pretenses: I knew the dad isn’t of much use to a newborn. When he’s crying, it’s not dad he wants. It’s mom. Still, I grew more discouraged, far more than I anticipated, when he’d cry and cry and I could do nothing for him, or his mom, for that matter, who just wanted and needed a bit of sleep. But it was mom’s milk he wanted and needed, and no amount of cradling and bouncing and singing and swaying and whatever else from dad would do the trick. So I’d pass him off to mom and take a walk to Einstein’s Bagels for a coffee and breakfast.

That, at least, I could do.

So I adjusted my expectations accordingly. While I wasn’t of much use to my son, I could be of supreme help to my wife. My new mission, then, was less as parent than Super Husband. Dishes? Done. Cooking? Got it. Laundry? Just tell me which clothes go in the dryer and which ought not to and I’ll do my best not to mess it up. Finding a purpose in my growing family’s life, even if it wasn’t one I anticipated, helped assuage the growing sense that I was, in some way, a terrible dad, because there was so little — nothing, really — I could do for my kid. I talked to Seain Cook, a new father himself, about it. He felt the same, expressing a sentiment you don’t see much, or at all, on social media or even said out loud: The early days of parenthood can be strangely dark ones for a new father.

I can’t even begin to tell you how reassuring that was. I thought, legitimately, as if I were the only one who hadn’t experienced that Big Magical Moment. That the world didn’t look entirely different the second my son first started crying. Seain and I, as well as Jake Dietrich and a number of other dads, have stayed in touch regularly. Everything I was feeling was far more normal than I would have guessed.

Maybe becoming dad wasn’t about the Big Magic, then.

Maybe, as I would come to discover, it was all about the Little Magic.

A week or two after Seain and I connected on the matter, it was 4:30 or so in the morning. The kid was screaming, mom was exhausted, and a diaper needed to be changed. I was, as you might expect at that time in the morning, having been ripped from the sweet blackness of REM, in a foul mood. Austin was evidently feeling a similar sentiment about his morning. I wandered into our guest room, where the changing table was at the time — it has since moved to our living room so he can look out the window, which he seems to enjoy, but who knows? — put Austin in a new diaper and, God bless it, listened to the sweet sound of silence. He was quiet and, dare I say, happy. He looked around, ogling at the blue Christmas lights we keep up year round. Then we just sort of stared at each other for what might have been 10 seconds or might have been 10 minutes. I put my forehead to his and closed my eyes and breathed in that amazing baby smell.

Little Magic.

They’re dopamine machines, kids, sources of Little Magic everywhere. Dopamine is widely misconstrued as the pleasure molecule, but that’s not quite right: It’s the molecule of pleasant surprises. When we discover something new, we get a hit with a shot of dopamine. As I began settling into my new role as dad, discovering – or at least think I was discovering – ways in which I could be of service to my kid, I began feeling, not the Big Magic everyone talks about, but Little Magic everywhere.

When I’d get him to stop crying by bouncing him on my chest and talking nonsense, just to keep his attention on my voice, which occasionally has a hypnotic effect – Little Magic.

When I’d be holding him while he’d poop, feeling his farts literally shake his diaper, and he’d let out the biggest, relieved smile – Little Magic.

When I’d see the way Delaney would look at us while I pretended to speed skate with him, or shoot him like a cannon, or a machine gun, or wind up with him like a pitcher – Little Magic.

When I’d take him on a walk, which rocks him to sleep, and come home to find that Delaney had succumbed to a much-needed nap, and now both of the loves of my life were blissfully asleep (and silent) – Little Magic.

When he’d fall asleep on my chest at church, or while watching a Lakers game – Little Magic.

There was magic abound, too, within our community. I’ve discovered, in this past month, that humanity is at its absolute best when around babies, and parents of newborns. We’ve cooked maybe five dinners ourselves in the month Austin has been alive. Beach volleyball friends have swung by with enchiladas and brownies and casseroles and all manner of goodies. Members of church have stopped by twice a week with dinner. Innumerable players have adjusted practice schedules in accord with my new morning diaper routine and other miscellaneous dad duties. Despite babies being, objectively, boring, dozens of friends have stopped by to meet our either snoozing or crying or eating son, who is not entertaining by any stretch of the imagination.

All of this, too, is Little Magic.

So maybe there was no Big Magical Moment for me. But every day, sprinkled throughout diaper changes and walks and dancing through the kitchen and goofing off and making mom laugh, there is Little Magic everywhere. I think I’d prefer it this way, to be honest. I know that every day will feature at least one dose of Little Magic. That I can come home from losing in the Huntington Beach qualifier and discover that, holy cow, I missed my son so very much. It took me by surprise, to be honest, how much I just wanted to hold him and stare at him and all the facial expressions he’s trying on for the first time. The loss was still fresh in my mind, and the sting still very much there, but Delaney commented that night, before we went to bed, that I looked happy.

I was.

I was enjoying a moment of Little Magic.