Lessons from my 1st year of fatherhood

A pandemic, a lockdown and a brand- new baby

Our daughter, Winnie, was born on March 22, 2020. As she learned to open her eyes, the world went into lockdown.

In the year since, I’ve learned so much I needed to know, including how to properly wash my hands — and a baby’s hands. And I’ve learned a lot I wish I didn’t know. Like how our country could get used to thousands of people needlessly dying every day. And the horrors of the fourth- month sleep regression, the eighth- month sleep regression, the 12: 15 a. m. sleep regression, the 3: 23 a. m. sleep regression and the 4: 49 a. m. sleep regression.

Nothing prepared me to become a new dad. It’s like a pandemic that way.

The things you assume you’ll really need — like toilet paper — are minuscule compared with the things you really need — like superhuman reserves of patience, resolve and generosity. But like the lockdown itself, we’re not just doing it for ourselves. That’s what makes it so important, and so hard.

We’re not in this together. In the sleep- starved glow of my daughter’s birth, I fantasized that the pandemic was the great uniter — a spiritual shock that would teach us the virtue of looking out for each other, or at least not spitting at each other. Now, I’m awake enough to know I was just as wrong as in 2016, when I thought Donald Trump would end up with more sexual abuse allegations than electoral votes.

My wife and I are both closer to 50 than 40. For a long time, I expected we’d spend the rest of our 40s enduring a series of increasingly expensive and painful miscarriages. But 2020 taught me one lesson over and over: Luck is real, and it’s mostly just another word for privilege.

A year later, our luck is intact. We weren’t among the more than 540,000 dead from COVID- 19 or their grieving loved ones. We weren’t among the tens of millions who lost their jobs. We weren’t single parents locked in an apartment with several kids. All the inequalities that existed before the pandemic have only gotten worse.

“We’re all in this together” is still my political philosophy, but it’s an aspiration. Sometimes even my wife and I aren’t in this together.

Forcing gratitude can be miserable. No matter who you are or what you have, caregiving will test you and your relationships. Parents of twins, triplets and more should be given medals or their own reality shows. Like most parents in the pandemic, we had no help at home, extended family were on lockdown, and babysitters were literally a dream. A baby’s scream in the middle of the night cuts through a lot of privilege. Fortunately, Winnie is generally consolable, even when we’re not.

Still, I’m burning my gratitude journal. I’ve learned that the drive to be

grateful by comparison and diminish my struggles, what Harvard psychologist Susan David refers to as “the tyranny of positivity,” can make me an awful mess of a dad.

Everything is political. Even before I changed one too- full diaper, I knew there was no decent argument for why a hedge fund manager should earn at least six times more than the average child care worker. Now, I wonder why every new parent in America hasn’t become radicalized.

Why does child care cost so damn much here while child care providers make so damn little? The simple answer is politics. The United States, the richest country in the world, ranks 30th out of the 33 nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development for public spending on families and children.

But the real answer is misogyny. Too many Americans consider caring for young ones “women’s work,” another way to say “indentured servitude.” To care for their families during the pandemic, women have been forced to make sacrifices that will likely set their careers back years. Hopefully, this pandemic family time has smashed the archaic worldview that child care duties belong to them alone.

We have to make it better. I’ll never know how different first- time parenthood would be without a killer virus circling the world. I do know that, like parenthood, no one has handled COVID- 19 perfectly. But few rich countries have handled it worse than we have, and no nation has let more people die of it. America has met the consequences of a twisted belief that freedom is a privilege with no responsibilities.

Parenthood has taught me the joy of responsibility. Perhaps my favorite job is playing audience to a baby comedian who can put on a two- hour show at 4 a. m. Laughter is inevitable when a tiny human hands you book after book rather than listen to you read one. And then the tears come from nowhere, just as quickly. All the time, I’m sure I could be doing better. I’ve never been so necessary yet fallen so short on such a consistent basis.

A year ago, I got to watch my daughter learn to open her eyes. Since then, I’ve been working on opening mine.

Winnie Sattler is now 1.