How Ya Sleepin?

Here is a weird admission for you: yesterday, briefly, I looked at my baby girl not as a simple adorable and helpless little human being, but as something else. I saw her as a reason for me being awake when I didn't want to.
I don't need to tell you this is not a good thing. Children do not always behave perfectly. As they age they do all manner of regrettable things. It's my job as a father to take the broader view and always continue to support and encourage her to do the right thing and to do the best she can. In this case, "the best she can" is essentially zero since she's not even two weeks old.
I realized my error pretty quickly and felt the appropriate amount of internal remorse, but I thought this was a good thing to highlight because there will be infinitely more instances just like it, and I hope to view her fully as a (tiny) person when they happen, and not simply as a vehicle to whatever annoyance or discomfort she is causing me.

Shifting gears, I'd like to say some more about sleep. Sleep, or my daily status with it, is far and away the number one topic for people when conversing with me. It's the first thing anyone mentions when finding out I've recently become a parent. It's even the first thing people talk about who see me regularly, like they need to have their constant updates. The subject's ubiquity has gotten so that I despise talking about it now. I remember the summer after graduating high school the first and often only thing anyone ever said to me was to ask about how I was excited to go off to college. Then last summer after getting married, every single person felt the need to generically ask how was married life. These questions are all in the same family as "So, what do you do?" The asker doesn't care the answer, he only asks because it lets him put a checkmark on his invisible social norms list.
The other thing about these constant sleep queries is the implicit assumption that my life has been turned upside down and that I'm walking around in some catatonic state of sleeplessness. Interestingly, it's the same for both former parents and the wholly uninitiated. Apparently, there is something in our culture that causes "new parent" to irrefutably equal "not getting enough sleep."
After first acknowledging that every situation is unique, let me shine a little light on this bit of accepted doctrine. New parents* do in fact sleep, and often several hours in one night. We of course average fewer hours post-baby than we did pre-baby, but I'm pretty sure for most parents the difference is much smaller than consensus would have you believe. I touched on this already, but the problem is really the inconsistency of the sleep. You might get only a couple hours one night or your six total hours might be split up into 4 or 5 segments of differing length. You might fall asleep at 9pm and wake at 1am, then only get 45 more minutes the rest of the night. Indeed, this can wear on you, but the important thing is that it's manageable. It's not like any of this ever comes as a surprise to a new parent: you have at least 8 or 9 months to get mentally prepared. And you adapt, because you have human instincts. Sara and I now can quickly recognize a window of sleeping opportunity and will pounce on it, even if it's still daylight outside or if it means sneaking in 45 minutes sitting upright on the couch in the room with no air conditioning.
The other key ingredient is that you are a new parent. This is an absurdly exciting time in your life. You are full of endorphins. In fact, you actually enjoy being awake at 3:30am because it means that you are at least looking at but more probably actually holding your baby child, which is really what it's all about. Whatever parenthood takes away from you, it gives back in another way, enough to more than compensate.
Think about it this way, in which scenario would your overall being be more "up": when you are getting a consistent 7-8 hours of sleep every day and doing basically the same thing in your life that you always have; or getting an interrupted and irregular 4 hours of sleep but you've also got a tiny beautiful baby at which you sare constantly involuntarily smiling?
Am I tired? In the traditional sense, yes I guess maybe I am. But I've also got such a huge infusion of energy and general happiness that the question seems hardly relevant.

*Assume all of this discussion is concerning only dual-parent households. I really have no idea how single parents would manage at the beginning of a baby's life.