In the days following my daughter’s birth in January, one thought crossed my mind often.
I can’t wait until December.
For me, December represented a point in time where the parental fears I was experiencing would be a little less intense.
You see, in the aftermath of my daughter’s arrival, I was intimidated by the prospect of being the parent of a baby again. While I wasn’t really that out of practice – my first child was born in 2020 – just enough time had passed that doubt had started to creep in. Would I be able to get back into the swing of caring for such a young child? And, more importantly, how long would it take my wife and I to adjust to the new responsibility of caring for a baby and a toddler?
Additionally, my wife and I were nervously waiting to see what kind of sleeper our daughter would be. Our son had been a dreadful sleeper as a baby. Went to bed late. Woke up multiple times a night. Was difficult to put back down. Obviously, you’re going to deal with some degree of that when you’ve got an infant. But this was every night for a year. Now, for the record, my wife and I love our son very much! But, man, those first 12 months were… grueling. Were my wife and I fated to experience that all over again with our daughter?
All these fears, ultimately, were felt against the backdrop of my daughter’s birthdate: Friday the 13th.
I’m not a superstitious person. But that date – with all its ominous baggage – did make me a bit apprehensive that the road to December would be fraught with perils.
And it was.
Although not in the way I anticipated.
I encountered the first of those perils in January, in the days leading up to my daughter’s birth.
From out of nowhere, I began experiencing hearing loss. One ear would be compromised, improve after a few days, then the other one would follow suit. During these periods of reduced hearing, it felt like the inside of my ear was being pinched shut. This was bewildering to me, as I’d never had hearing problems before.
Frustratingly, during my wife and I’s entire hospital stay with our daughter, I was partially deaf in my left ear. (As annoying as that was, I’d say it was still a slightly easier hardship to bear than the C-section my wife underwent or my daughter’s experience being, you know, born.)
After we returned home from the hospital, I made an appointment to see an ear specialist. By the time that doctor’s office was able to fit me in, however, nearly three months had passed and my symptoms had abated.
When the symptoms eventually returned, I just gritted my teeth through them. I Googled and practiced every conceivable way to unplug one’s ears. When those methods proved ineffective during a stretch of compromised hearing this fall, I made another doctor’s appointment. But, of course, my symptoms lessened once again by the appointment, giving the doctor little to go off of, aside from my word.
It’s December and, unfortunately, I don’t know much more about what’s going on now than I did in January.
There was one thing I had no trouble hearing this year, even with my uncooperative ears:
The sound of birds inside the walls of my house.
Yes, you read that right.
It all started when my wife and I detected an awful stench wafting down from the ceiling fan in our kids’ bathroom. Had an animal, we wondered, somehow managed to get into our house, up in the rafters, and died? The stench smelled organic, so we felt confident that that’s what had happened.
We also felt confident that it was a fluke. Clearly, some squirrel had managed to force its way into our place, got trapped, and was now rotting above our heads. After a week or so, the stench dissipated and we moved on with our lives.
But then it returned. And kept on returning.
The culprit at the heart of the matter came into focus when my wife and I noticed something protruding from an air vent outside of our house: a bird corpse. This discovery prompted my wife to monitor all of the house’s vents. And she witnessed birds coming and going from all of them.
These birds, we came to find out, were starlings. An invasive species. A pest-management company came out and investigated the problem further. In all, the company deduced, a total of 40 birds had taken up residence inside the walls of our home.
Once I became aware of that, sounds that I had previously attributed to other sources – the wind, the house settling, etc. – got reattributed to the winged trespassers lurking on the other side of our drywall. The whole situation felt like the Alfred Hitchcock movie “The Birds.” For real.
Obviously, my wife and I couldn’t let these birds stick around – not with the potential for them to damage our home, or make our family sick upon dying and decomposing, as some already had. So, we shelled out nearly $1,000 to the pest-management company to remove them and install grates over our vents.
And as starlings are not a protected species, you can surmise what “removing” them entailed.
This wouldn’t be the only time death descended on my neighborhood in 2023.
When it returned, the victim was – tragically – a member of my own species.
One morning in September, a fellow dad in the addition, not much older than me, went out for a jog. This was something he’d done countless times. As an avid runner, he was a regular sight in the neighborhood. You could always spot him on account of his dastars – a Sikh head covering – which were frequently colorful.
On this particular morning, his run took him out of the addition and onto one of the adjacent country roads.
And it was there he was killed in a hit-and-run incident.
His death has been difficult to process for many reasons, although I keep coming back to two, in particular.
One reason is the cold randomness of it. I mean, he died doing something he’d done every day. Why did this instance have to end in tragedy? It’s the kind of death that forces you to confront the harsh reality that the universe really is indifferent to our existence.
The second is that he was a father. One morning, I remember passing his house on my way out of the addition. He was with his daughter as she waited for the school bus. And I caught a glimpse of him dancing. Visually, it stood in contrast to how I usually saw him – a runner whose eyes expressed focus and dastar conveyed dignity. Here, he was just a dad goofing around with his daughter. A fleeting moment, yet so revealing.
Knowing I’ll never see him jog past my house again makes me sad. But knowing I’ll never see him dancing with his daughter again…
Sad doesn’t even begin to cover it.
For a year that started, in earnest, with my daughter’s birth on Friday the 13th, it’s only fitting that one of the year’s recurring images embodied that date’s portentousness.
My city, Fort Wayne, Indiana, was like many places in the Midwest and East Coast that found themselves in the path of smoke from the historic wildfires in Canada. It was almost incomprehensible, the extent to which a city like Fort Wayne, nearly 200 miles away from Canadian land, found itself engulfed in the wildfires’ smoke. My workplace has a clear view of the city’s skyline; it was surreal seeing it blotted out, looking like an inferno were at our doorstep.
Fort Wayne, of course, was never in any real danger (save for deleterious air quality.) There were no fires. Just smoke.
There’s a parallel here to the experience of being a parent, or even just an adult. I find that fear is more present in my life now than ever before. As with any parent, having children is a major source of that anxiety. You worry about their wellbeing constantly. But there are other worries that touch all adults. Like career progression. Relationship health. Mortgage payments. And so on.
For me, things like hearing loss, animal infestation, and close-to-home death fueled my anxiety in 2023. They were a reminder that fear is exponential. That it has the capacity to spread, like wildfire. Because when bad things happen, it conditions you to anticipate more of the same (even if you don’t realize it.) Before you know it, your whole worldview can become corrupted.
That’s the most insidious thing about this breed of fear I find myself contending with as a parent and thirtysomething. Simply put, it compromises your ability to foresee all the ways a situation could unfold. Instead of being able to consider the range of outcomes, you fixate on the most negative one.
However, I try to remind myself: Fear is not reality. And the truth is, the desirable outcome in many situations is not only possible… but probable.
I should know. The fears I had about my daughter at the start of the year (Would my wife and I struggle caring for her and our son? Would she be a poor sleeper?) never came to pass. It’s funny… because I was so certain they would.
Instead, my wife and I got acclimated to being two-child parents in short order; by the time summer rolled around, it was old hat. And, similarly, we realized early on that our daughter looked forward to bedtime. Most nights, we can rely on her to sleep 10 hours. It’s been nothing short of amazing.
The smoke from the wildfires has long since dissipated. But it contained a lesson that’s worth remembering:
Sometimes, where’s the smoke, there’s fire.
Except, of course, for the times where there’s only smoke.
EVE OF STEVE 