Because you crapped on my hand and I still let you sleep in my bed. No, that isn't quite right.
Let's try again.
I laid there in bed and I stared, through the dim light of the night light, at his face, snuggled into his mother's breast, her arm gently wrapped above and around him, protecting him from the night. I looked at her, a dark towel under her head from her evening shower, face pale in the light, the slightest trace of a sleepy smile still stuck to her lips, a smile that grew from his fall into slumber. And I thought to myself, how can you explain this love you feel for this little creature?
Obviously, parents love their children (or should), but how is it rational that a faint feeling of exaltation comes through me when he is sleeping and popping out little goose sounds with his breathing? How is it that as I am changing him, his face channeling through smiles and consternation, I pull his legs back to slip the diaper under him and he lets out something between a fart and a minuscule bowel movement (a fleck, or a shart, if you will), I feel nothing but utter love? How is that his cries of uncertainty, the cries that come and seemingly are unstoppable, how is it that these cries that burn our ears and tear at our hearts, don't leave me pulling my hair, but laughing?
Okay, perhaps his cries don't always leave me laughing. Just ask my wife.
But nevertheless, how is it that these horrible and odd and benign things happen, with no obvious outpouring of mutual love on his part, and I can't do anything but love him more and more? Is it mere evolution? God's divine plan? Some sort of chemical off-gassing that causes the new father to be subdued by some sort of primordial ether so that we don't eat our young?
I sit here, already into the next day, and I can't for the life of me figure it out. All I know is, that as I lay down each evening, or as I awake in the middle of the night (this has been happening less so since we first brought him home and have had him sleeping in our bed...in the beginning I would bolt upright, afraid he was being smothered, only to find him and mom, peacefully sleeping...in 2 hours bouts), I look over at my wife and my son, and cannot but sound campy when I say how in love I am.
