Parenting Through the Fog

Nights are medication timing and feeding schedules. Bonding from unconventional angles when my body won't cooperate. On being a new father with POTS.

My daughter cries and it cuts through the pain like it's the only sound that matters. It usually is. I'm a new father. My body is still fighting its own war. Newborns don't pause for flare-ups.

The irony: my body wants rest most right when she wants me most awake.

Nights are medication timing and feeding schedules, worked out by trial and failure. Some nights the pain peaks and I hold her lying down, both of us horizontal on the bed, her fingers wrapped around mine. That's not a compromise. That's how we talk to each other.

3am is the hardest hour. Getting up feels like moving through concrete. My partner carries more of the physical weight than either of us planned. I hear the voice that says I'm not doing enough. Then my daughter finds my eyes in the dark. No judgment there. Just her.

I've learned to parent from odd angles. Diaper changes from positions no book teaches. Bottle-feeding worked out around what my body will and won't do. When holding her upright is too much, we lie on the bed and play with soft toys and make faces at each other. A good bath time is a win. A soothing session during her fussy hour is a win. I've stopped needing them to be more than that.

My illness is already just part of her normal. She seems to know my bad days somehow, gets calmer on them. I wonder what she'll grow up already understanding about how bodies work, and don't.

I track her feeding times next to my symptoms. I plan medication around her naps. I always have a backup plan for the hours my body simply says no.

I'm writing this down. The hard days and the good ones. Someday I want her to read it and know her father's body had limits and his love for her didn't.

She doesn't need a superhero. She needs a father who shows up.

I'm learning constraint doesn't cancel love. It just changes its shape.

She's asleep on my chest right now, her breathing syncing with mine. The pain is still there. It just isn't the only thing that's there.

This isn't the parenting I pictured. It's the one we have. We're building our own rhythm, this small person and her father who has to plan around his own body to hold her. She's too young to understand any of it. She's already teaching me anyway.