Twenty Four Days

Thomas David Nichols is twenty four days old today.

I have done this before. Twice. I have two older boys and I remember the first month with each of them, or I thought I did until this one.

Here is what is different, and here is what is not.

What is not different

Three in the morning is still three in the morning.

The thing where you stand over the crib and watch him breathe, because some part of your brain has decided that if you stop watching he will stop breathing, and you know that is not how it works and you watch anyway.

The way your hands learn to do things in the dark. The way a house rearranges itself around a person who weighs less than a bag of feed.

None of that changed. I do not think it changes for anybody.

What is different

I am different.

The first time I did this I was younger and I thought the job was to protect him from the world. Build the walls high enough. Be big enough. I was going to be the thing standing between my son and everything hard.

I have since learned that you cannot be that. Not because you are not big enough. Because the world does not go around you. It goes through you, and then it gets to them anyway, and the only question is what they saw you do when it came.

So this time I am not trying to be a wall. I am trying to be a record.

What I want him to find

Someday he is going to read all of this. That is a strange thing to know about a person who cannot hold his own head up yet.

He is going to read what was said about his father, and what his father said back, and what his father built while it was being said. All of it is on this site because I put it there on purpose, and part of the reason I put it there was him.

I want him to find a man who told the truth even when it cost him. Who wrote down what happened instead of letting other people write it. Who got knocked down in public and got up in public and did not pretend the knockdown did not happen.

I did not have that record to read about my own father until much later, and I wish I had. So I am leaving one.

The part I did not expect

I expected to be tired. I am tired.

I did not expect to be calm.

There is a version of me from a few years ago who would have spent this month in a panic. About money, about the cases, about whether I was going to be there for him at all. That man had reasons. I am not going to pretend he did not.

But I am not him right now. I do not fully know why. Some of it is work I did on purpose and some of it is grace I did not earn. The best I can say is that I have watched enough foundations fail to know which one held, and I am standing on that one, and it is quieter here than I expected.

Twenty four days in and the thing I feel most is not fear.

It is that I get to be here for it.

To my two older boys

You are in this too, even though I am not writing your names right now.

Everything I just said about your brother, I learned from you first. I was still learning when you were this small, and I am still learning now, and I am grateful you keep teaching me.

The record is for all three of you.