I was born into beer, in Milwaukee, the way that Bernie Brewer used to slide into the stein after home runs at Brewers games. An electric Blatz sign decorated my childhood bedroom. Neighbors worked for breweries. My father would let me finish the dregs of a beer when I was young enough that this was meant to put me off the stuff. I never did become a big drinker—just enough that when Pepin was still in the Special Care Nursery a friend brought a beer to the hospital with dinner.

I didn't drink that night or any other until very recently, two months after Pepin was born. I've been busy, been tired. But mostly I've been holding my breath, like a sharpshooter, afraid to break concentration.

My pleasures have been subsumed, redirected.The darkroom where I print photographs for my art studio has been, well, dark. The 7.2-channel surround-sound stereo in the bedroom now exclusively plays lullabies. The subwoofer sometimes doesn't even bother to click on, as though depressed.

Parenthood is claustrophobic. It may take a village to raise a child, but unless you're in the Amana Colonies, those diapers are your problem. With newborns, you're trapped in the elevator and all the Diaper Genie does is press the open-door button over and over. It's not that you can't go anywhere, it's that you can't stay there. Not for long. The world shrinks to a couple rooms in the house that are crucial to supporting life, and the further you drift from them the thinner the atmosphere becomes. This is the origin of babytalk.

The other day I escaped—two happy hours in a single evening. The bottles weren't plastic or filled with milk. The conversation was rarely, if ever, about poop. No interactions ended with the need to plug someone's mouth with a pacifier. It was like old times, except it wasn't. By 8:45 p.m. when I returned home, Lucy was exhausted. I'd missed my nightly bottle feeding of Pepin. There's no re-entering the atmosphere without burning up.

Later that night, in the wee hours, I had a third happy hour. There was only one drink on tap: milk, and plenty of it. Pepin sat on my lap as she always does when she takes a bottle: facing me, leaning back, one arm luxuriously draped across my leg like a driver's over the passenger seat. She drank until she passed out. We were happy.

(Photos: Pepin at happy hour. With dad, at the milk bar that never closes.)