Decrepitude

6:42 a.m. -- 4 mos., 30 days

When M was pregnant, a friend asked if I realized that, when our baby graduated from high school, I'd be in my early 60s.

Yeah, I said, I was aware of that.

He asked, Don't you feel old to be having a first child?

Not really, I said. Lots of people -- Westerners, anyway -- have babies in their 40s. It's not such a big deal. It's not like I was ready to have a baby two decades ago. And it's not like I'm Tony Randall, who left behind 8- and 6-year-old children when he died at the sprightly age of 84.

Then Baby A was born.

One sleep deprived morning a few weeks later, when we were still being awakened every two hours, I asked my mother-in-law how she had managed her household, which at one point featured four children under the age of 7.

She never thought much about it at the time, she said. It was the 1960s, and lots of families were of similar size.

"Besides," she said, "I was in my 20s. I had a lot of energy."

I am 44. My energy flags. I feel old.

Much of it is the five-month experiment in sleep deprivation. As the chief diaper changer, I'm the one hopping in and out of bed throughout the night. Still, I suffer no delusion that I am more taxed than M, who breast feeds Baby A at all hours and, far more attuned to her nighttime rhythms, awakens when the kid so much as coughs.

At this point, Baby A regularly sleeps four to six hours when she's put down. But she goes to bed around 8 o'clock, meaning her first wake-up time comes around 1 a.m., just when we've settled into our first sleep cycle. Then she wakes about every three hours. And she likes to rise early.

On the good nights, her cries rouse me gently from a light dream state, to which a few stress-free moments later I happily return.

Last night was more typical. After a cranky evening she'd finally gone down around 8 p.m. We retired at 11. I was traveling deep in my subconscious -- a submarine? a steel mill? -- when Baby A roused me in her full-voiced thrash mode: limbs flailing, back arching, cries piercing. The clock read 1:14 a.m.

I tottered up, lifted her, and stumbled to the changing station, where I was annoyed to note that the diaper was practically dry. My mumbling of the Diaper Change song failed to soften her wails; increasing my volume only urged her to do likewise. I blew on her -- sometimes this makes her pee, which can relieve me from another change in an hour's time -- to no avail. I wiped, grabbed a diaper, and spent 20 seconds trying to find the velcro straps, only to realize that I'd put the thing on upside down.

Now Baby A was really howling. "What's wrong?" M asked.

"Nothing." I reversed the diaper, picked Baby A up, stumbled to M's side of the bed, and rolled her onto M's breast. She immediately settled down, but my brain was by now awake enough to spend a good 30 minutes wandering through a store of anxieties before drifting back to sleep. Baby A slept all the way until 5, but after that change she was wide awake, and I got to babysit for 90 minutes before returning her to M and turning to my computer.

By now I believe I'm accustomed to my perpetual state of mildly disturbed consciousness. And I count myself lucky -- I'm not working, and I don't have to use high-level brain functions routinely. (Not that I wouldn't mind being called to do so more often.) Plus, every couple of days I take the chance to lie on the kitchen floor next to Baby A's downstairs crib, put the boppie pillow under my head, throw her traveling blanket over my torso, and catch a few winks while she takes her afternoon nap.

Now the problem is less with my brain than with my bones -- specifically, a bone in my left wrist. As Baby A has gained weight (at last measure, almost 17 pounds), she's taking more of a toll on my carrying arm. Plus she's stronger and more likely to wriggle free, meaning one-armed carrying has to involve a firm wrist wrap so the left hand can secure her butt.

After several weeks of near-constant tweaking, my left wrist has given out. Even just turning my empty arm in front of my torso at a 90-degree angle shoots pain through the wrist.

M felt the bone a couple of nights ago and thought it felt "frayed" compared to my right wrist bone; she thinks I've fractured it somehow. This strikes me as hyperbolic; it seems more like some carpal tunnel variant.

Then again, she's right that I see doctors only when she's complained so often that I fear her wrath.

Holding her in my right arm isn't a long-term solution. I'm primarily right-handed, and it's awkward to lose my dominant hand. And she doesn't tuck comfortably into that arm; within seconds she slides down my torso, and I'm constantly rehoisting and readjusting. I've been doing a lot of two-armed carrying, but that prevents any other activity when she's in my arms, which renders too much of my day unproductive.

So every morning the wrist feels a bit worse. Every morning I commit to not carrying her in my left arm. And every morning by 10 I'm carrying her in my left arm. I feel like a ballplayer grinding through a six-month season, knowing a couple of rest days might help him heal but determined not to skip a game. I need a sub, a back-up, a designated carrier.

Yesterday, in the homestretch of our morning walk, we passed a trim, 50-something man jogging in the opposite direction. "How's it going?" I asked. "Feeling old," he said, though he was neither sweating nor panting.

I haven't jogged since Baby A's birth; our twice daily walks are nice, but they do little for either my cardiovascular health or my waistline. This guy, at least 10 years my senior, could run me into the ground. I was pushing the stroller with one arm, my left dangling to give it a breather. I felt vaguely pathetic.

"I hear you," I said. "Feeling a little old myself."

The man laughed politely. He didn't know the half of it.