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I'd driven an hour from home to give a talk and was up on a stage with my cell phone off when my wife, Tabitha, left three messages.
In the first, she said our son, Walker, was having trouble breathing and so she was taking him to the doctor. In the second, she was on her way from the doctor's office to the emergency room. In the third, she was on the emergency room pay phone, either crying or trying not to cry. "He has RSV," she said mysteriously. She added that he was strapped to a gurney and waiting for an ambulance to take him to a place that handled infants with RSV, whatever that was. Her cell phone wouldn't work there, she'd been told, and there was no number on which I could reach her.
And so I found myself doing 85 across the San Mateo Bridge, heading back to Berkeley from San Mateo and toting up in my mind how little I'd done in my son's 11 weeks on earth to keep him alive.
Seventy-six nights and I'd spent zero in the same room with him, unless you counted the night of his birth and the few times I stayed up until midnight to feed him a bottle of pumped breast milk before handing him over to his mother. Eating was another thing he'd done almost entirely without me, eight times a day, or more than 600 daddy-less meals in total. His diaper needed changing about as often as he ate, yet I'd done that seven times and remembered each event. He slept 16 hours a day, leaving eight in which he needed to be tended.
Roughly three of those went to feeding and another to bathing and changing clothes—two more activities I'd managed to avoid entirely. That left him just four hours a day of what might be called discretionary leisure, or about 300 hours total, of which I'd occupied no more than 30.
Those were the raw stats: They shocked even me.
No matter how you spun them, they suggested a truly awesome paternal neglect. Seven out of 600 diapers! It had to be some kind of record, at least in the modern era of fatherhood. (As opposed to my father's era: He once said to me, as he watched me attempt to dress a six-month-old, "I didn't even talk to you until you went away to college.")
Two children had seemed like the right number to both my wife and me until we had two, and even then it seemed sort of like the right number to me. Two was always the plan. Then one day, Tabitha began to shoot me long, soulful looks at night and say things like "I just feel like someone's missing." Though we adored life with our two daughters, my wife thought we should at least discuss the idea of having a third child, but, of course, all that meant was that she'd already made up her mind. And that was that.
Once a collectivist farm, we now had more in common with a manufacturing enterprise, beginning with a ruthlessly efficient division of labor. Mama took care of the baby. And Daddy, at the age of 46, took care of everyone else, or paid other people to do it for him.
Some weeks before this, I'd introduced our two daughters, Quinn and Dixie, ages seven and four, to their new baby brother.
Walker's birth was supposed to have put the girls into a delicate psychological state. So Tabitha bought and read them countless books about sibling rivalry, took them to endless sibling prep classes at the hospital, and rented many sibling-themed videos narrated by respected authorities—Dora the Explorer for Dixie, Arthur for Quinn. The current wisdom holds that if you seem not at all interested in your new child the first time the older ones come to see him, you might lessen their suspicion that he's come to pick their pockets. So as our children waited at the hospital door, Tabitha moved Walker from her bed and into a distant crib.
They pushed through the door and into the room.
"Can I hold him, Mom?" asked Quinn.
"No, I want to hold him!" shouted Dixie.
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