Miles

For every week for the past at least ten weeks, I have been day dreaming about writing about Miles. However, it wasn’t going to be about Miles. It was going to be about Roger.

Who is Roger, you ask? Roger was Miles before Miles was Miles. It was his name while he was in the womb, growing from a blueberry to a water bottle and then finally to a pumpkin.

And why Roger? That is a much more complicated, intense answer that I’ll partially share. Roger Rd. is in Tucson about 4,000 feet on a hypotenuse line from my house. It is a non-descript road that has a dead end at a wash. Two years ago, when driving by it with Alex, I could only think one thing –

“Roger. That’s a nice name. Maybe we’ll name our kid Roger.” Alex wasn’t pregnant at the time, and she laughed it off, as she does for most of my suggestions. Whatever future child or son we may or may not have, his name was not going to be Roger.

However, flash forward to late 2023 / early 2024, and we were informed that Alex was pregnant with a boy. We didn’t care about finding out the gender. We didn’t care about a lot of things – when you go through a miscarriage as a married couple, it painfully bonds the pair, and forces you to focus not on xx or xy – but simply put, on life. There’s no fancy word for miscarriage, though I think a “miss” is an informal colloquial term that works. It’s not talked about; similar to how people stay quiet about how much money they make. For several weeks, “Maybe Baby” was inside Alex. And unfortunately, that’s exactly what it was.

For round 2, we couldn’t have another Maybe Baby nickname. So once we found out it was a boy, Roger Road and Roger was the only thing that popped into my head. We needed a name. Not a concept. The legend of Roger was born – it was “Roggie’s Room,” cards were being written with his name on it, and poems recited with him as the main character.

Everything changed on August 6th. Roger transformed into Miles in a matter of seconds. A wave of indescribable feelings rush over you in the moment. It’s a special moment that should be shared with your partner (and all the doctors and nurses), and it would be an invasion of me and Alex’s privacy to over transcribe the details.

I was naïve heading into the “trying” post-marriage stage. However, over the past twelve months, I’m proud of how much I have studied the birth-baby-dad bible to really appreciate how powerful it is to have a kid. And it’s paying off with our little one. And mind you, some of this has been anecdotally with friends, not all in the fine print or in the three hour baby class where I was eating nuts the whole time (memo: CVS lightly salted roasted nuts are top of the line).

Back to Miles. I’m exhausted taking care of him which is why I’m going on tangents about CVS mixed nuts. But I love it. I love taking care of him. Everything may change and in a month, perhaps I have a different tone about it all. But right now, I love his poop. I love his pee. I love his post feeding burpy face. I love when he sits on my lap. I even love when he’s crying because I usually know when he’s going to stop.

This is an ode to Roger. And a post about Miles. I love them both.