The Existential Dad

What time is it? Hard to tell. The clock says it is 3 p.m. My body says it is Never O’Clock, a land beyond time I arrived in, Through the Looking Glass-style, by virtue of sleeping, for many months, just long enough to stave off a hallucinatory breakdown.

My wife holds a boy, Jack.

I hold a boy, Eli.

The boy is fussy. He whines, his voice like a rain of straight pins. He yells, his voice like a box cutter. I walk, holding him in cradle position. I rock, holding him like a football. I clutch him to my shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Nothing helps. Never O’Clock, it seems, is a timeless space built for whining and crying.

“He fights it,” Lisa says, meaning Eli cries his way toward sleep. “Make him fight.”

So I sit down in a makeshift fort of pillows: Eli in my left arm, an iPad to my right. He cries. And I jiggle my boy. Not sure what I am trying to mimic here: A car. A swing. The motions he felt in the womb.

He wails and groans like I am torturing him.

Then he quiets.

Yawns.

I try to jiggle with no more enthusiasm than before. But inside, I am thrilled at Eli’s silence. I begin to read a book on my iPad: Why Does The World Exist? An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt. The book ponders a central question of philosophy: why is there something, rather than nothing?

I’m reading it because it relates to my own book, Fringe-ology, and suddenly I am … reading. I am lost, pondering the mysteries of existence. When I turn back to my left there is a small, perfectly sleeping boy nestled in my left arm. His lips are full and pink. His eyelashes are terrifically long, telescoping out like the tendrils of a flower. He sleeps. I turn back to my book. Holt is in Europe, pondering the Big Bang, a universe that is slowly expanding. I feel myself coming back together.

The man who pondered and read. The new dad who loves to stare at his boys. I watch Eli sleep—vivid, no atmosphere clouding his round, glowing moon face. And more than an hour passes like this, till it is no longer Never O’Clock.

It is 4:40 p.m.

I will finish reading this book, even though I already know how it ends: Why is there something rather than nothing? Oh, Jim Holt. For Eli.

*I will be writing a regular parenting column at Be Well Philly.