Andrew Sterman - My First Year as a Father

Musician and Chinese medicine teacher Andrew Sterman recounts how he decided to have children with his wife Anne, an acupuncturist, marked by a ceremony inviting “universal creative forces.” He describes two successful home births in 2004 and 2007 with midwife and doula, using acupuncture during labor, and the mystical intensity of birth. Sterman emphasizes dads focusing on postpartum recovery, being responsive, avoiding toxic masculinity, and meeting children as distinct personalities from birth, following the child’s lead, limiting overstimulating toys, and finding the first year primarily joyous despite fatigue, co-sleeping challenges, jaundice, and work-life tradeoffs.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:10

On every life's journey, we encounter many firsts. And those moments shape the course of our lives. Welcome to My First Year Podcast Series. And this is My First Year, The Anthology. And I'm Sophia, creator of the series. Today's episode is selected from the upcoming podcast, My First Year as a Father. My co-host for this episode is our founding senior producer, Gabby Watts, and our special guest is Andrew Sturman.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

Andrew is an accomplished concert musician, author, and composer. He's also a teacher of Qigong, meditation, and diet and nutrition related to traditional Chinese medicine. And last but not least, he's a father to Ravi and Miriam.

SPEAKER_02 1:01

We hope you enjoy listening.

SPEAKER_00 1:18

And what was the decision that made you want to become a parent?

SPEAKER_03 1:22

Wow. Well, I had our two kids uh in a little bit of what you might call midlife. I was just past 40, and I had been living quite a busy life, uh, working in the musical community of New York City and traveling a lot, concertizing all over the place. And I did not want to have kids earlier. And when I met Anne, who I married, who married me, all my friends said immediately that I had married far above my station. And I thought it was really in relationship that I began to think that that yes, we could parent. I never really had that feeling before. So it was about the person and about the world that we were making, the world we were living in together, that we thought we could invite a couple of people into that world if that's the way things were going to be.

SPEAKER_00 2:14

What was it about the relationship that made you? I mean, because you said it was in partnership that made you think about parenthood for the first time. What was it about that that led to that?

SPEAKER_03 2:25

That's a great question. I saw a strength between us that might be possible to meet. I wouldn't say challenges, because parenting is joyous. And I think it gets a bad rap. I think a lot of people they say, oh, you're never going to sleep again, you know, you're never going to really be with each other again. This is way too much fear. It's really joyous. And especially in the first year. I can't say anything negative about it, really, but I know perhaps other people would disagree. But in any case, I saw a strength between us that filled in to make possibilities. And then when we d decide uh to invite children, because we're not in control of these things, we did so very, very deliberately, as with a conscious verging on a ceremony, which was in in my experience, I won't say it as a fact, but to me, to us, was extraordinarily beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 3:23

So that's interesting. Is that something you could share with us a little bit more about?

SPEAKER_03 3:29

We sat together back to back in um the living room of our home. We said some words and we sat in the quiet, and I think the words we said amounted to basically an invitation to uh whoever's running this game. We're ready if you if you feel like it, and send us someone interesting, deep, powerful, we'll take care, we'll do our absolute best. One thing we forgot to ask for was easy.

SPEAKER_00 4:01

Oh, that definitely would have been a good thing to add to the list. So can you take us back to the beginning? Um, back to the births in 2004 and 2007.

SPEAKER_03 4:11

We had two births, both successful, both at home. One was on the bedroom floor, the other was in a little water pool in the living room. We had a midwife, a fantastic, like major master midwife, and we also had an excellent doula. We had very strong ideas about a healthy birth. We wanted to pace things according to natural pacing rather than to be rushed. This is the woman's choice, of course. Uh, she chose not to medicate for pain with epidural and so forth. And she is a very, very strong individual. So this is an individual choice. I wouldn't say others, there's no there's no pain shaming going on. But we wanted awareness. My wife's a master acupuncturist and teacher of countless acupuncturists. But during the labor process, I was the one doing the acupuncture. When the contractions were really getting intense, she'd say, you know, use the point, use the point, which the point we were using was down on the calf and the fleshy part of the calf. And I'd say, I am. And she'd say, Start doing it, start doing it. And I mean, I'm like hitting the needle like very, very dramatically. We were laughing when, you know, crying laughing when she was saying, Come on, use the protocol. And I said, I am. I mean, it was extremely dramatic.

SPEAKER_00 5:36

Yeah, and I think when we were talking earlier, you did say, sort of, you know, obviously in a very tongue-in-cheek sort of way, that the birth is more difficult for the father.

SPEAKER_03 5:44

This is the joke, right?

SPEAKER_00 5:46

Yeah, that's the joke. Can you kind of explain that joke and where it comes from and also sort of how you were feeling throughout the process?

SPEAKER_03 5:56

It comes from my twisted sense of humor, which I enjoy if no one else does. Of course, we the intention is not to insult your spouse or any other women. We know that women die in childbirth. We know it's just incredibly painful and dramatic. Um, I don't know if it needs to be traumatic, but definitely dramatic. I'll tell you something that people don't talk about about birth. Women who go through birth or attend births know this. The society doesn't really know it. That in the birthing process, there is so much energy pushing from the inside towards the outside world within the woman in labor. Animalistic intensity. Now, this I'm not saying it's not human, as no insult intended, but an animalistic truth comes into them. If they're giving birth in a natural way, we become our animal cells. There is sweating from the roots of the hair to the ends of the hair. Sweating. It's incredible. And what that's not because it's hot, it's because the body is pushing from the inside out everything you can push. It becomes instinctive and unspeakably powerful. And it's a thing of that process that hardly anything can compare.

SPEAKER_02 7:18

Wow.

SPEAKER_03 7:19

And a little bit past halfway through, when I'm looking at this, like watching my partner, and she said, Well, I think this will be easier the second time. I looked at her. That's what you're thinking about now. You know, it was the funniest thing because it was so intense. You know, this is part of the superiority of women, right?

SPEAKER_02 7:39

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 7:40

And then they say, Okay, let's do this again. As the birthing partner, you're relatively helpless. But the thing is that, you know, no one's sleeping. It's intense at the mystical level. There's it's not normal intense. Okay. So a birth and a death share intensity. It's as if heaven itself is opening up and offering insight. You have a doorway into heaven at this point. Everyone feels that. If you attend a birth, you could be like just an interested party who's allowed in. You feel this mystical uh completeness. And it happens also if you attend a dying process. Those are the two times. And I would say, again, this is this is how I amuse myself, but it's I'm also quite serious. Everyone is a mystic attending a birth or a death. But only the mystics are still mystics the day or two after. People fall back into the regular routine, right? Fair enough. So the point is that this can change you if you're paying attention, if you're open to change, and that nothing really is the same.

SPEAKER_02 8:50

Yeah, that that's pretty profound.

SPEAKER_03 8:53

But then, especially for the dad, after the birth, you're kind of on duty. It's for the mother, it's about inviting the baby to breastfeed, to be on your skin. The skin to skin is incredibly important. The baby's building the microbiome because babies are born sterile. And so the microbiome begins to form, begins to grow within instance or even during the birthing process from the mother's body. This should happen. It must happen. But then a real focus, and this is the focus of the dad, in my opinion, is on the mother's recovery. I would say that in the modern world, we are not rebuilding new moms very well. There's at least a month of recovery, at least, let's say three months of actual recovery. And that's where the dad needs to cook, needs to make sure everything's going well, needs to be the one on duty when the baby's crying. Of course, the mom is the mom for feeding and so forth. But as much as you can do, you're on duty. We talk about the toxic masculinity. I think it really comes into play. If you're having a child and the day after you say to the woman, okay, cook me my dinner. That's absolutely pathological. I mean, it's disease thinking. I don't think that the husband that can't make food and demands that kind of care and so forth, wash my socks, cook my dinner. I don't think that's normal. I think we got into that some in some weird way of misogynist culture. I would like to say that this is normal, that we take care of each other. And there's a baby to take care of, and we take care of each other. And um, there's a lot of instinct that comes into play. So I did a lot of cooking.

SPEAKER_00 10:48

I would love to hear about the moment that you know you met your son for the first time. And in our previous conversation, you're talking about some of your expectations you had about what it means to be a person, how we are created, nurture versus nature. And you had some pretty huge shifts pretty immediately in the way that you thought about that once you met your child for the first time.

SPEAKER_03 11:14

Yeah, well, our first he was born, he was very mellow, right from the beginning. He's and now he's uh a young adult, and he's he's I wouldn't call him mellow per se, but he's thoughtful, he's a sensitive person, very sensitive person. But he was very mellow in his first appearance. Our daughter, who came just under three years later, she opened her eyes and had this look on her face, and I looked at her, and the midwife in Doula looked at her and looked at her, and we all, our eyebrows went, wow. And she had this look on her face, like, okay, did that, what's next? It was really, really remarkable. And she's like, Okay, I I got this. You know, what do you what's the next move? What's the next chapter and my journey, my curriculum here? I was very ready to go. You know, what do you got? Well, let's take another breath first, okay, before all that. And so it's very, very different personalities from the first breath. And I think any parent who has more than one child will say this, or anyone who's been around uh births will observe that children are born from the very first instant with some degree of personality, and it's still there. This is the question of nature and nurture. Of course, nurture is incredibly important. But basically, you can ruin kids more than you build them. I think that there's a ton that's built in, and your job as a parent is to raise them, guide them, without forcing them to be other than they are. Because they come already with an agenda, with a set of characteristics unmistakable.

SPEAKER_00 13:02

And I was wondering, was there anything from your own upbringing that you wanted to bring into your version of fatherhood? And what were some things that you wanted to make your own, you know, something that you wanted to make different?

SPEAKER_03 13:15

Well, my own father was very, very warm, pretending to be firm and strict. So he definitely had a very judgmental side, very strong mind, came from another world. His parents were immigrants, it was new, it was there were a lot of, there was um, he lived in a rough neighborhood when he was young. There was uh physical threats and physical violence uh in here in America, racial violence that he was always trying to steer his way through. And he always wanted to protect us so we wouldn't have things like that, and worked really, really hard to stabilize. And he did. It was extremely stable in that way. But meanwhile, underneath there was also a tremendous, tremendous warmth, tremendous uh intelligence. And even though he was a scientist, there was a tremendous spiritual intelligence, which I believe I inherited from him in large part. And it's something that we would occasionally talk about that uh no one else in the family would talk about. So I got many spiritual and emotional and intellectual gifts from him. I don't know that you need to try to replicate the kind of parenting you received. It happens by itself. And then you decide where you find yourself doing things, right? And then you certainly make certain decisions on how you would like to maybe steer that a little bit clearer this way, a little bit more that way. And of course, times are different.

SPEAKER_00 14:48

Do you have any examples of you know something that you noticed that you were doing that your parents did, and then how you decide to proceed from there?

SPEAKER_03 14:59

Hmm. You know what's what's really interesting is if if you have the good luck to have children while your parents are still in the world, and if they're close enough, and you watch them with a newborn, with a one-year-old, with a three-year-old, you get, even though they are older by 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, you get to watch how it was for you. So it's like watching a strange home movie, even though it's not you in it, it's your own kids in it. You get to see, like, oh, this is this is how they would pick you up. This is what would happen if the diaper need changing. Is it clear? Is it honest? Is it weird? And you'd see both things. You'd see, you know, weird things and clear things, and then you get to decide how to be different.

SPEAKER_02 15:50

Yeah, this is interesting insight about watching your parents interacting with your own child. Could you tell us some more about your own interactions with your kids? Um, if you think back, were there moments of real special connection with your kids in the first year?

SPEAKER_03 16:12

Tons of time, which was an absolute treasure. I mean, you don't really think of it, you don't say to yourself, oh, this is so great. You know, you just do it, but it is so great. And holding time, walking around. We personally, by the way, we never bought a stroller. It just carried them until they could walk, and then holding their hand, walking. And a couple of times when number one was walking really well, and number two just needing to be carried. I would we would walk to the store every day, and I would carry her in a big shopping bag, like a canvas shopping bag with two handles. And so we go to the store like that every single day. They would see the food, they would pick things out, learn which avocados to choose and so forth. And that was just part of it. All the time, all the time. But also a lot of time at night when um I'm trying to make sure that Anne was getting some sleep in the first year. If they didn't actually need to nurse, then if they're crying, I would pick them up and walk into the living room areas and so forth of our New York apartment and spend as much time as it took. I would just get down on the floor. You got to spend a lot of floor time in those early years. Dads, get on the floor, super important, and play what they're playing so that there's no difference. And as much of that as you can, and they're learning and you're learning what their world's like, and you want to see the world from nine inches off the floor, crawling around with them as they're crawling, it's just tremendous fun, singing and all that.

SPEAKER_02 17:46

Is the idea that you are bringing yourself into their world and seeing their surroundings through their perspective?

SPEAKER_03 17:56

Exactly. Exactly. The way I I've tried to do this was you follow hyphen lead. So they want to play with this, that's where you follow. Okay, we're playing with this. And then here's one more thing we can do with this. Oh, and then they play with that. So you don't lead eight things, you just lead one thing. What's the next thing? So if they're playing with the rug, you don't it doesn't need to be a toy. People overdo toys, by the way. And we never had electric toys for the kids until they were teens. Because the electric toys can be really damaging to the neurology, to the nervous system, and so forth. Way, way overstimulating. So we would have these um just like simple things, mechanical, stuff you move with your fingers. Learn this with your fingers and so forth. And of course, I have musical instruments at home, be careful that the kids don't knock them over. I used to leave them out, I had to stop leaving them out. But they're playing with them in these really unusual ways. Because I play saxophone, flute, and clarinet, and at one point, I have a photograph someplace of our first when he was still in diapers, I believe, and he's encountering my saxophone, and he has his foot, his whole leg down the bell of the saxophone. You know, he's still in diapers. And that was his way of exploring what this thing is. So you let them play as well as you show, yes, they know I have a serious world, practicing and so forth like that, and going out to work and traveling to perform. They would see dad on stage, never knew otherwise. But yes, you get on the floor, you look at from their eye level, think about what the world sounds like to their ears. Their ears are very sensitive. Everything's sensitive, what things taste like. And even though you can't enter their dimension, we try. We try to enter it, look and see what the world is like from there, so that we can lead one step forward without pushing them, you know, to grow too fast, which is another huge problem. So let them be. They're kids. But you got to get on the floor, you have to. And uh the time for um boundaries and strictness comes later.

SPEAKER_02 20:10

Yeah. Well, it's really sweet to hear you talk about that. And also I could just tell how present you must have been with your kids and how physically attuned you were to them in their early years. Um I'm thinking about uh, you know, in conversations with my friends, uh, both men and women, they talk about, you know, once they become a parent, it just opens up this incredible depth of love that they've never felt before. I'm curious what was it like for you? And um, is there a way that you could actually describe how it feels in your body?

SPEAKER_03 20:59

It feels like a cellular love. Every cell is offering a hug, every cell of your body.

SPEAKER_02 21:11

That's beautiful.

SPEAKER_03 21:13

But I don't think that's limited to parents. It just it's within, because uh you know, in a sense, a father is it's relatively abstract. I mean, we didn't give birth, so how are we different? You know, and you see a child that might look a little bit like you, but unless you're a complete narcissist, that's not what the game's about. It really truly isn't what the game's about. Your children are guests in your life, they're uh interesting gifts from another realm. And they live in their own realm. When you're you look at a child, and whether it's the first moment, the first year, or any any given day, you look at them kind of like, who are you? In a good way. We don't know who these people are. This is a a huge mistake that our society has made historically over the last bunch of hundreds of years and so forth. Thinking that we're in control of the kids, this is my family, my rules, and it should be your rules. The parent has to be the parents' rules, but it doesn't mean you own the game. The kids come and they are unique. And they live in their own, in a sense, in their own universe, their own dimension of life. Things are different. So things taste different to them. The taste buds of children are incredibly clear and strong. And we taste something as adults, it's like, wow, that's nice. And they taste it's like, wow, it's just like a nuclear explosion in their mouth. So they are in different universes, and we forget that. And that's why parents and children butt heads, is because we're we're saying, you need to be in my universe. This is a brutality we do to the spirit of our kids. And so this is the paradox. We have to raise them, you have to tell them what the rules are without forgetting that they do really live in and are evolving in a parallel universe. So we have to teach without utterly controlling. And no one's ever done that perfectly well. Nobody. It's not possible. You know, but I can tell you something a little bit interesting that my son said, as now as a young adult, maybe a couple of years ago, and he's doing really well now, but he had a couple of tough years and you know, late adolescence. And at one point he said, You tried to solve everything just with pure love. Sometimes it takes something else. And I looked at him and I thought about it and I thought, look, if we're going to err on the side of just loving your kids so much that they they call you on it later, that's probably a pretty reasonable mistake to make compared to say, well, we disciplined them way too hard. You know, I left them in a cold room crying so they would learn not to cry, you know, which is that kind of thing is relatively uh popular. People speak to that. We never did that. We are always responsive. The first year you are responsive. So there's no mistakes from the baby side in the first year.

SPEAKER_00 24:21

Well, I was wondering too, of um, it seems that you're talking about the first year, and you kind of automatically fulfill this role as you know, you're reactive. That's kind of like what you're doing, and you're like a caretaker. And the first year isn't as difficult as later years of parenting. But were there any specific moments in the first year that was kind of a hardship that you didn't realize that was gonna happen?

SPEAKER_03 24:48

Well, our first guy used to like to sleep with us, which I think is a beautiful thing. I think kids are scared when they're on their own asleep. When you're sleeping, you're vulnerable. And I think there's a primordial scare in children. And I don't I don't think kids should be scared in their first year. That I don't think they should be terrified, waking in the night all alone. I mean, think of that in a primordial sense that you know, kids out in the wild, like in um in cave existence or something like that, and they wake up in the middle of the night and they're alone. There's there's no tribe around, they would be vulnerable to any kind of predator. It's a primordial fear in the dark in the night alone. So our our little guy would sleep with us, and we had we had a sleeping place for him right nearby, but he would often sleep with us, and then what he liked to do was what they call the H, where uh, you know, here's one partner, here's the other partner, parallel, sleeping parallel as adults do. And then he would sleep sideways with his feet in your in your eyeball. There was a lot of feet in the head thing that was I wasn't expecting that. And they were soft little feet and lovable little feet, but feet, you know, in your like waking you up like uh and it was funny. It was funny, and it was amusedly difficult. You know, I think the difficulty would come if there's a health concern for for anyone in the family, and we had jaundice at the beginning, and we um handled that with actually Chinese herb and one of the artemisia that we would just sort of you know dab his lips with a little bit. We had a pediatrician and uh she wanted to use some more some stronger protocols for jaundice, and we said, let's it usually resolves, and she said, yes, but yes, but and we said, no, we will watch very carefully, and that resolved perfectly.

SPEAKER_00 26:53

Well, I do wonder about the way that you went through the birth, also sort of raising your kids, it's not as conventional as you know, most parents in the United States, I would say. You know, obviously you incorporate a lot of Chinese medicine, um, different wellness practices that people aren't familiar with. But how as a parent, did you ever feel judged by other people with your sort of particular style of parenting? And how did you deal with that?

SPEAKER_03 27:23

Unless I'm forgetting, didn't feel judged. We had people asking us for teaching on it because Anne's a master teacher of Chinese medicine, acupuncture. I am teaching diet and um in Chinese medicine dietetics, including fertility and pregnancy and postpartum and weaning and pediatrics. So I more than being judged, we had people ask ask for advice. Can you take us through this? We would like to conceive, and it's not going so well. So we would teach a little bit. And there were one or two friends that did judge us. I think I even lost one or two friendships because we weren't going through the hospital system sufficiently to their judgmental view. And it's very sad. I I love my friends and it's a shame to lose them, but that's not really my choice, it's more their choice.

SPEAKER_02 28:22

Yeah, I could totally see that. And I would say that it's their loss. So speaking of being unconventional, you and M both have such multifaceted careers, right? I'm curious, when your kids were young, um, there must have been moments where you had to compromise and adjust your schedules. Uh, could you talk about that for a little bit and whether or not you had to um let your own work take the back seat for a while?

SPEAKER_03 29:01

I made a choice to demonstrate to my kids, for better or worse, that parents have a life, parents have passions, parents have interests, they have evolution, and I I chose to follow that evolution, to um do what I love doing, so I could th they would never say parents give up, your life is over when you have kids, you stop doing what you love. In general, we had more time at home than almost any working parents. And Anne had a really nice office, but she would treat at home for a year or two. People would come in. I have a beautiful, strong memories of this, that the bell would ring, we had a curtain up across the living room and the door, so the people having a session would be in private space, and the front door to the kitchen to the back rooms was a free channel. And I would let in the next patient. They would sit in the waiting area, and I would get them water and have the baby uh either in my arm or in a sling, or they would be with Anne. And countless times Anne would be welcoming a patient, taking their pulses, listening to their story, doing diagnosis, and then leaning over the patient with the baby between, like it's sort of held in the sling for gravity, doing acupuncture treatments, or they're with me in the kitchen, and then at night I would go to work, come home late, and we would run it like that. So I don't know if we changed how much we changed our schedule. It seemed like we kept our schedule, maybe a little too much. Well, I can tell you one funny story is that day one, less than 24 hours old, I got a phone call from Philip Glass, the composer, who I've been working for. And at this point, it had been 15 years now, it's 35, 36 years. I got a phone call. Can you play a recording session? We're doing a film, we're doing a movie score. I thought, wait, I really kind of want to do that, you know, movie recording session. So I said, I said, yes, I can do that. And so on no sleep for three days, I went and played this recording date for a film, went home, and there was Anne and this newborn baby listening to his first piece of music in life, was this beautiful record called Coltrane Plays the Blues, which I've I've had that record since I was 13 years old. And I looked at her and I said, This, and she goes, This. So this is his first music. She goes, This is his first music. And he sat there looking at the sky, listening, hearing this music. I don't know about listening, but hearing this music, he didn't cry at all, which is this is like an hour. And then the record kind of finishes, and there's a bonus track that Coltrane himself did not permit to be released on the album. It's experimental, wasn't really up to snuff. Then the little guy starts to cry. He goes, No, no, no, no, we don't like this one. That's his first experience with music here on earth. But we juggled all those things. That was typical. I mean, that's you know, the first day is very unusual. And so then I was going to work with no sleep, but you just do it. The music plays itself. Parenting, in a sense, takes care of itself. You just do the next step, do the next step. Then a very funny thing happened. We were about eight months into the first year, and Anne and I, with the baby, went to see my herbal teacher, a great master of Chinese traditional medicine, classical medicine, with a very, very long pedigree lineage. So we went to see him, and he looked at us, and he has no children, no marriage, he's a priest. He looked at us and he said, You seem tired. And we just cracked up. Of course we're tired. We have a you know, a young one, eight months old, and and he looked at us like and it thought dawned on me in that moment. Maybe it doesn't have to be a panic of exhaustion doing this. Maybe it doesn't. That's like an idea, you know, because you always hear, like, oh, you're not gonna eat well, you're never gonna sleep, you have no time for yourself. And it dawned on me that it doesn't need to be like that, that we can calm down and sleep. And you sleep when the baby sleeps, whether it's a nap during the day, if the baby's napping, take a nap. And at night, absolutely don't stay up when when your child is sleeping when in the first year. You want to to join that sleep. So you we just it's that that one thing, like you look tired, you two. It was so ridiculous of a thing to say from a supposed master, right? But in fact, it was masterful and it opened up this whole idea. Maybe you know, maybe we can get rest. And it's quite possible. I think we did much, much better after that. Yeah, we did. So it's funny the little things, right? The little idea that somebody plants in your head. Because we have these suppositions that that uh it's going to be incredibly hard, that your life changes forever. It's just different.

SPEAKER_00 34:22

I think that's a great perspective to have. And I am wondering, though, when you had your kids, you know, you and Anne, you're freelancers in these unconventional careers. How did you deal with everything financially?

SPEAKER_03 34:38

My approach to money worries, which are very much a father thing in the conventional sense. In in our family, we have two working parents, of course. But um the fathers sometimes they're conditioned to take this on as their main reason of life. I don't think that's well, everyone do your own thing. My my approach to it was just stay busy, work as hard as you can, checks come in, keep working, keep working. And I never really thought about it beyond that. And that that worked rather well, as a matter of fact. Uh, but to worry about it when you can't do anything about it, that'll ruin the family. And it does, it rips families apart. I will say, because um, for me, parenting has been with two kids, when Anne was pregnant with our second, I was offered uh a big chunk of work, about two years of work, where I wouldn't have had to, like, I would still be traveling and and so forth, but but my New York City work would have been taken care of for about two years. And I thought about it and I turned the offer down. It was about to start right when I have daughter Miriam would have been born. And I turned that work down, which felt like a very undad-like thing to do. Most men I know would seek more. Like, can I have more hours at work? Can can we take on more responsibility? I've got another one coming. We need we need this. And I I thought to myself when I discussed with Ann, I need to be home more. Because we have we have one who's um still very, very young, and you will be in birth recovery, postpartum recovery. There'll be a new one to take care of. I need to be home. And so I basically took about six months off with no pay, or yeah, I was still working freelance and so forth. It was enough for us at that time. But I did a very unatypical thing, I think in some people's minds. It made sense to me. I thought about it when that offer came in of this big, big chunk of work. I thought about it and I said, let me sleep on it for two days. And I had terrible dreams, anxiety, anxiety, and I just knew it was wrong. I followed my gut on that, said, no, I need to be home. And I not so much for the newborn, I need to be home for the two and a half year old for that relationship. And then now, 20 years later, if I had worked those two years, I wouldn't be able to find the money. You know that it wouldn't be here, right? And uh, whether it's small money or huge money, it doesn't matter. You would not be able to find it. And the time at home was an absolute treasure. Uh, so I don't regret that decision at all. I think that was maybe one of my best decisions ever. I was home more. That was the point. Home more and happier. So something that I think fathers forget.

unknown 37:36

I don't know.

SPEAKER_03 37:37

Fathers can be very, very happy, but we do forget sometimes that in that first year, they won't remember to tell you, but they're absorbing and learning what the world is. What world did I get born into? And it's very different than the one we were born into and the one our parents were born into, unrecognizable, and you want it to be happy at home.

SPEAKER_00 38:00

Yeah, that's a great point. And you've said in our interview that you don't think parenthood fundamentally changed you as a person, but at the end of that first year, how did you feel different?

SPEAKER_03 38:17

There's an interesting thing that happens, and this it happens in, of course, everyone's a different person, happens in different ways. But there's a certain sense of some people would call it validation, that your life is not just a selfish life anymore. Of course, it would be false to think that our life needs to be selfish if we're if we're single or or not not parenting is absolutely ridiculous. But nonetheless, a lot of people feel this. I think I felt some of it, that uh finally things were were serious, finally things were of import, and they there was some matter to all of this. Of course, many, many things in life matter enormously, but there's this on this other level that there's diapers to be changed. This matters enormously, and it's of the moment and so forth. And there's a certain beauty in that. And as a musician, artist, and also in in my work is in the healing arts, there's sometimes a feeling we're off to the side of society. And when you're a parent, you're in the center of society. This really matters. And so that's a beautiful feeling, and I think that that that grows. I don't think it should define us. I don't think that adults should or parents should use their children to define their life and to make life worthwhile and so forth, but nonetheless, it does feel very important. So uh it's joyous. I think the the first year, that's the word I have for it.

SPEAKER_00 39:55

Well, Andrew, thank you so much for talking with us.

SPEAKER_02 39:58

Yeah, thank you so much, Andrew.

SPEAKER_03 40:01

Oh, thanks for having me. You're talking about about the family, it's so private, but um, what's more important?

SPEAKER_00 40:16

Our guest, Andrew Sturman, is the author of the book Welcoming Food: Diet as Medicine for the Home Cook and Other Healers. He can be heard on many of Philip Glass's recordings and has released three solo albums of his original music.

SPEAKER_02 40:30

Thanks for joining us. My first year as a father is an original Sophia Media production created by me, Sophia. This episode was produced by senior producers Gabby Watts and Samira Tarazi, and hosted by Gabby and me. Check out our website at sofiamedia.co slash my first year for more episodes and other shows in the My First Year series, and for social links where you can join our online community.