Week One Charlie, and here’s what nobody told me at the baby shower while they’re cooing over the organic onesies and making jokes about sleep deprivation like it’s some kind of sitcom punchline instead of the existential throat-punch it actually is: I’m not ready. I will NEVER be ready. And every single smiling face who told me about the “joy” conveniently edited out the part where I’m lying there at 2:19AM with this tiny perfect mammal on my chest wondering if I’ve already screwing it up just by BREATHING wrong.
Look at this photograph, this moment of manufactured peace, this brief intermission before the real show starts. This MOMENT, before the corruption sets in, before little Charlie learns that life is basically just one long audition for a role nobody actually wrote and we’re all just RIFFING on dead playwrights’ themes thinking we’re doing something new… Even Sharka knows something I don’t yet, something about how family life is just organized chaos pretending to be a system, and Week One is the only time I get to exist in that beautiful ignorant space before the weight of it lands on me like a freight train made of responsibility and terror.
Because they sold me the Hallmark version, the soft-focus fantasy where love conquers all and instinct kicks in like some kind of evolutionary autopilot, but what they DIDN’T mention is that fear, that cold sweating middle-of-the-night fear, that’s just as primal, just as real, maybe MORE real because at least fear is honest. Fear doesn’t need a greeting card. Fear just sits there in the dark asking: What if I’m not enough? What if I break this irreplaceable thing? How do you live up to a life you’re suddenly responsible for creating meaning in?
Charlie doesn’t know yet that he’s supposed to be my redemption story, my second chance, my proof that I finally got something right. Week One Charlie is just BEING, just breathing and needing and existing in that pure animal state. Give it time, I’ll teach him anxiety soon enough. We all do. It’s the family tradition nobody puts in the photo album.