This is the first Mother's Day I have spent as a father, and as I sit down to write, as with most other things about fatherhood, I find I do not quite know where to begin.

I’d probably expected to write something general. Something about mothers as a greater category. But what keeps coming back to me is that I think about last night. And every night, for that matter. My wife, awakened in the next room, nursing our son, speaking and singing love into his innocent ears. And the specificity of what she does in that act alone is so large that the general feels almost dishonest. So I will try to say it plainly.

I, of course, do think first of the pregnancy. Of the months of quiet discomfort she carried without complaint. The nausea. The aches she could not stretch out of. The sleep that came in pieces, when it came at all. The strange, slow rearrangement of a body to make room for a person. None of this was visible to most of the people she passed in a day. She simply carried it, and went on. She’s tough like that.

And then the labor. Hours I will not try to describe, because I was not the one inside them. I only watched. I watched her do a thing that asked everything of her, and then ask for more, and give it. There is a kind of courage that the word courage does not quite reach. I saw it that day.

These are the things one is supposed to thank a mother for. The body given over. The pain endured. The hours.

But what has surprised me, in these first months, is that none of it is the thing I find myself most grateful for now.

What I am grateful for now is the answer in the night. It is a quiet, innate thing — one that makes mothers of a great many women who never bore a child.

Drew is small, and the night is large, and he does not yet know what either of those words mean. He only knows that sometimes the warm world falls out from under him and he calls for help into a dark he cannot name. And every time he calls, she answers.

Yes, I know, it’s not always - we have to train his independence. But she is always listening, monitoring, watching with sensitivity to his current situation, never letting him bear too much. Embarrassingly, I carry this role only a small fraction of the time, and never as well.

These are special hours. A great weight of love is transferred during them, and the collective experience of these moments changes the giver, too.

I am mostly a witness. When I am barely awake, or even still sleeping, I have seen her rise in the pitch black of every hour of the night, and in the slow blue hour before dawn. Time and again. The cry, and then her stirring before I have even understood I am awake. The soft thud of feet. The door. The voice already beginning, humming something she did not plan to remember. By the time I have lifted my head, the dark has been answered. Our son is being held, and rocked, and told without words that the world is still here.

He will not remember any of this. He will not remember the specific lullaby, or the specific night, or the specific tenderness of being lifted at 3:14 in the morning by the person who loves him most. The whole great mountain of it will sink, eventually, beneath the floor of his memory.

But it will have built him. The whole shape of him — his confidence in the world, his belief that calling for help is worth doing, his sense that the dark is not the final word — will rest on the foundation of these unremembered nights. She is laying that foundation now. Brick by brick, in the small hours, while the rest of the world sleeps.

Every comfort any of us ever offers another person is, I think, a return to this scene. A friend at the hospital. A hand on a shoulder at a funeral. A voice on the phone at the right moment. We are all, our whole lives, trying to do for each other what someone did for us first. Shannon is the one doing it for him.

So this is a small letter, on a single, simple day, mostly addressed to her.

Thank you for the months you carried him. Thank you for the hours you labored. Thank you Shannon, and Linda, and all mothers of every kind, for the nights you have been answering ever since.

John

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John Conrad