Kiyoshi Mio-Imagn Images

Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.

May 6
The exhaustion has finally hit.

This might sound odd, but I was never all that worried about the exhaustion. I‘ve suffered from insomnia since I was 18, and it has darkened every corner of my adult life. My first job out of college was as a marketing assistant at a law firm. Once, after a particularly rough stretch of sleepless nights, an associate came into my office (a closet that I shared with a janitor) to assign me some work. After one look at my ravaged face, a knowing grin spread across his. He clearly had more fun than I did when he was 23, and he assumed that I’d been out all night partying. “I remember those days,” he said wistfully. Imagining the debauchery that could have left me so haggard was bringing him so much joy that I didn’t have the heart to tell him the truth. Not only had I not gone out and painted the town red last night, I had gone to bed before the sun had even gone down, hoping that if I stayed in bed for 12 hours, maybe I could scrape together eight hours of sleep in bits and pieces. Needless to say, it hadn’t worked.

All of this is to say that the exhaustion is crushing, but I feel like I’m about as accustomed to it as you can get. Earlier this year, after I suffered a particularly rough night, my wife would sometimes say, “We need to figure out your sleep before the baby comes.” I disagreed. I figured that I’d be so very tired that it wouldn’t matter. I’d travel so far into that undiscovered country that even the exhaustion wouldn’t be able to tag along, and I’d just pass out whenever the opportunity presented itself. That’s pretty much what happened — for the first month anyway.

Then a few things happened concurrently. Over the past week, Derek Jr. had some particularly challenging nights. Second, we realized that the early shift needs to extend longer. Between the physical recovery and the demands of breastfeeding and pumping (the latter of which forces her to wake up during my shift anyway), my wife was carrying way too much of the load. However, that means the extended early shift now often goes past dawn. My only chance for some off-duty, uninterrupted sleep comes during daylight hours. The third one was the real killer: The insomnia finally caught up with me.

Now, I put Derek Jr. to sleep around 10 or 11, finish up some chores, fall asleep for an hour or so, wake when she awakes, change her, feed her, change her again, soothe her, swaddle her, put her to sleep, do the last of the chores, and then go to bed myself. But I can’t fall back asleep. I just lay sleeplessly for a couple hours until she wakes up again, then repeat the routine, this time 50% more zombified. It’s brutal. My stomach is knotted all day. A constant low-level headache worms around the left side of my brain. I’m gaining weight. At some point in the middle of the night, as she screamed her head off over the indignity of having her diaper lovingly changed, I have a vague memory of offering Derek Jr. my surrender. I mean that literally. I told her that she’d won. “I surrender,” I said out loud to my half-diapered one-month-old baby. With yet another ear-splitting screech, she made it clear that she would take no quarter.

I watched some baseball in there. I saw Ramón Laureano absolutely blast a home run to center field against the Giants on May 4. The Padres were down 3-1 in the ninth inning, and the homer made it a one-run game, but the rest of the Padres went go down quietly. I regret that I’m not paying enough attention to really appreciate the beginning of the ABS challenge system. I’ve been writing about the strike zone for years. I feel like it’s become at least a little bit my beat, and now I have to watch as other people break down cool new insights that I’m often too addled to fully understand. I did pay enough attention to wonder what the hell you all are doing without me. How is every player in baseball injured, except Mike Trout? How do only three AL teams have a winning record? Is there a new Nick Castellanos that I don’t know about, or is the Nick Castellanos that I know about still getting playing time?

As I write this, Derek Jr. is napping, which is to say that she’s been sleeping for an hour and a half now, but every several minutes she engages in a few seconds of light moaning, just enough to make me worry that I’m going to have to come comfort her, then settles back down. I’m watching the Dodgers boat race the Astros, 12-2. Andy Pages has hit three home runs, but I only caught the last one, when he launched a monsterous blast off a 53-mph eephus from poor César Salazar.

I can’t close with any parallels or metaphors or themes this time. Nothing is coming to my addled mind and Derek Jr. is due to wake up any minute now. When she does, I will tell her that everything is OK. I will unswaddle her and pick her up and tell her how much I love her and how sweet she is. I will change her diaper. I will bounce her on my shoulder and sing to her and feel overwhelmed with love. I will miss the even smaller creature she used to be, and I will try so hard to mark all the details of this moment because I feel them all disappearing so fast.

One thing I hope I remember forever: At some point in the wee hours of this morning, Derek Jr. made quite a mess. Luckily, my wife had just finished pumping and was on hand to help because it was very much a two-person job. As she cleaned up the changing table, I held a very naked Derek Jr. to my chest and pointed out her adorable tiny butt. We never get to see it because she’s always diapered, but it is, I realized there in the night, hilariously minuscule. Even with it right in front of you, it’s truly difficult to wrap your head around the reality of a tush that tiny. It’s hysterical.

Normally, when you see a baby in the wild, they’re wearing a diaper, which pads their butt and makes it look enormous. It’s a lie, a fraud perpetrated on the public by big Big Baby, and because it fits right in with their big jelly bellies and their big round heads, it’s a very believable lie. But the absurdly skinny truth was laid bare for us on this night and we couldn’t handle it.

That’s the whole memory, the two of us in the dim light by the changing table, exhausted beyond reckoning, giggling uncontrollably at the world’s narrowest tush and lamenting its regrettable reclusion. Maybe you had to be there.

Wait, I do have a metaphor after all. It’s now the fourth inning of the Angels-White Sox game, and somebody on the Angels just popped up to second base. It’s a very bright day, and Chase Meidroth didn’t just lose the ball in the sun. The sun destroyed him. He literally lay down in the dirt, so overwhelmed that he couldn’t even attempt to protect himself. He just cowered there and kind of hoped that he’d still be alive after the ball landed wherever it was going to land. One sympathizes. OK, Derek Jr. is awake for real this time. Bye.