“I’m so tired.”
I had no idea how to reply. As a basketball coach you tell players to push through. As a high school teacher you say “stop staying up so late playing Fortnite.”
As a husband watching your wife endure labor without the benefit of medication, it’s tricky. Everyone in the room knows there is no other way this ends except with birth. No picking it up later. There is no choice but perseverance.
Tired exists in many contexts.
I get tired of commercials on Netflix and Prime Video, tired of too many subplots that seem to be added just so the series can have ten episodes.
After my first marathon my brother remarked, “I saw you jogging at mile 21.” I corrected him, stating I was clearly running. I may have looked like I was simply jogging but the pedal was to the floor. I was tired.
It sounds horrible but I’ve been tired of catching fish before. This has unfortunately happened numerous times and each time I chastise myself for missing the point so badly. Like when I wanted to catch steelhead but was only catching rainbow trout. Beautiful, blushy rainbow trout filthy with spots.
I am tired of political ads with no context because I’m tired of political campaigns thinking we are too dumb to understand things are more complicated than a 30-second ad interrupting our streaming experience.
I am tired of Alaska politicians performing to impress Lower 48 political machines and pop culture politicians rather than working for Alaskans.
I am familiar with all those brands of tired.
I am tired today because my daughter eats, poops and eats again more than she eats, sleeps and poops. The cycle is not predictable or orderly. The journey through the night is not a long road filled with stoplights that interrupt sleep. It’s an old logging road filled with water bars.
As much as I want to move on to the next phase, the one with stretches of sleep longer than an hour, I have been warned about the speed of things. To get impatient is to miss out even if it’s a moment of laughter shared thanks to an explosion of excrement in a brand-new diaper at 1:32 a.m. Before I know it I will wish I was living what I was tired of at the moment. Not because I love the sound of a diaper being saturated in one take, but the other irreplaceable moments that come with that age. My baby is too young to smile at me but there are cues that she is thankful on a basic human level. That innocence is irreplaceable. She often looks at me accusingly wondering where the useful parent with the milk went but it’s nothing personal. It’s all very simple and uncomplicated.
Plus, as tired as I am, my wife is certainly more so and there is no other way through this.
This tired is important. This tired has stakes. When I slowed down my marathon time went from respectable to mediocre. No big deal. When I get tired hiking up or down a mountain, I take a break. The consequences are minimal.
Nothing is more important than how I do my part to help raise this child. This was a concept before the pregnancy started, now I feel the weight of it. Maybe writing about this is as much to tell a story as it is signing my name and agreeing to the terms and conditions of fatherhood.
There is no choice, I might be tired for the rest of my life.
But I’m excited for the adventure.
• Jeff Lund is a freelance writer based in Ketchikan. His book, “A Miserable Paradise: Life in Southeast Alaska,” is available in local bookstores and at Amazon.com. “I Went to the Woods” appears twice per month in the Sports and Outdoors section of the Juneau Empire.
