It’s hard to dress your baby.

My initiation to a secret society of squishing toes into tiny socks 🧦.

Prefer ear-reading? (Listening.) I gotchu. 🎧 Click above to hear me reading this to you, unfiltered, unedited, and in my underwear.

Here’s something they don’t warn you about parenthood: how hard it is to dress your baby.

All through my pregnancy, I was fear-mongered, of course, about sleeplessness, vaginal tearing, epidurals, colic, and preschool prices, but not once did anyone mention to me that dressing a baby is like trying to put a fish; well, it’s like trying to dress a fish. (A live floppy one.) Except a fish would be easier because it doesn’t have four limbs that seem so delicate they could snap like a wishbone if bent the wrong way.

Ten weeks ago, my little Hannah Banana went directly from my insides to the NICU’s insides, where I think she got a little TOO cozy as she extended her visit for a week and a half. So like, the length of my honeymoon. While it was scary and tiring and emotional, the only silver lining (and I’m talking a really, really, really thin lining of silver here) was that her wardrobe and hygiene were included with her room and board. (Food wasn’t. So we made our own. 🍼)

So I’ll tell you: when we brought her home and became the responsible party for her attire maintenance, we found ourselves quickly thrust into an unpredicted challenge. And because the first many weeks of her homecoming included daily outpatient doctor’s appointments, this meant, for us, daily undressing and redressing IN PUBLIC. And not just in public like anonymously on a train station bench or in a booth at Wendy’s; this public was in front of trained pediatric medical professionals who earned the right to assess us like a hair colorist’s allowed to grimace when she sees a girl on the subway with roots looking like one of those two-toned cars from the 1950’s…

There we were, brand spanking new parents, Jesse delicately carrying around a car seat with our living 5 lb. American Girl doll and me cautiously securing entrances as if one kiss between a door and the car seat would give our baby brain damage, having to struggle through the challenge of disrobing and re-robing our girl in such a way that the medical professional wouldn’t take her from us for unsafe elbow bending.

But I loved every second of it. Through each attempt to trap her tiny toes in tiny socks, I kept thinking to myself, oh yes, this is life. This is real life.

I recently heard the sentiment: “The macro is made of the micro,” It struck me the same way a keychain stamped with everything happens for a reason hit middle school me as the truest of truisms. (I resisted the need—or ability, this time, to type this one-liner into my AIM profile in bright pink comic sans with *~ surrounding it.)

Though popularized as a goal achievement mentally (as in, consistently doing the micro-actions will create macro results), I’ve taken it to mean that our macro life is made of micro-moments.

Like some people excel with nearsightedness and others with farsightedness (and myself still not comprehending the difference), I have always looked through a micro lens, and I have felt at odds with a world so focused on the macro. I tried hard to hop aboard the macro train, giving importance, energy, and priority to the BIG THINGS that I see valued OUT THERE. The BIG THINGS that warranted a prize, an email blast to extended family, or a celebratory dinner at Dakota’s Steakhouse (RIP).

So I tried to derive meaning in the ways I saw around me: from good grades leading to career success, noteworthy achievements, and public accolades. But through that, I found it was the in-between things (the micro) that gave macro meaning to my days—a quick joke shared with a shy stranger, a shirt found on sale at Gap that brought out my eyes, a three-pointer I swished in one second of one game out of a long basketball season.

With each passing year, I felt more like a depressed alien afraid that the way I found meaning in life might never make sense to other humans. I told myself repeatedly, “be happier—you have a book deal. You have a K in your follower count. You have a lovely home. A hot husband, even hotter dog. You were on Good Morning America, woman!” It didn’t work, though. So I thought something was wrong with me. What else could explain why having dreams I’d seen on others’ vision boards made me feel the same level of arousal as I get on a good hair day?!

But then Hannah was conceived. No—that sounds too passive. I conceived Hannah thankyouverymuch, and suddenly, I found myself somewhere I’d never known existed. I met doctors and nurses who thoughtfully obsessed about inches in an ultrasound, I read millions of women discussing the over-the-counter-happenings like heartburn and hair loss on message boards, and I saw strangers on social media celebrating my belly growing from the size of a grape to a cantaloupe.

Apparently, there had always been this underworld of folks who, like me, experience as much joy from seeing their baby lift their head a centimeter off the ground in tummy time as I’d seen others experience from seeing their face projected on the big screen in Times Square.

I had just missed it because I was stuck on the surface where my attention was so impressively being hijacked by the LOUD things in our culture like money, career success, and how our hat looks in our beach vacation photo needed to grow one’s #personalbrand.

See, it’s the Macro that makes The Media, but it’s the micro that makes A Life.

(Boom. I’m proud of that line.)

And that’s why, even though putting a duvet cover on a comforter fourteen times in a row is easier than dressing Hannah just once, doing so has filled me with contentment.

Because finally, I exist in a world where others agree that macro (she’s walking! Talking! Driving!) can only get achieved after many, many micros. It’s every snap of a onesie (and then unsnap and re-snap because inevitably I’ll miss-snap at least once per outfit) that builds an existence, just like I learned it’s every bout of nausea during pregnancy that makes a person we see “welcomed to the world” on Facebook.

Inevitably, this also means that behind every Nobel prize winner are many, many poopy diaper explosions. And that makes me laugh.

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