Not All Peaks and Valleys

Wish I could remember the exact quote and who said it, but in some ways it's clear that war and fatherhood have a couple of things in common. At least around 15 months, I think the notion of long periods of normalcy, doing drills, watching him, trying to think ahead to when he can play tennis, or talk about a book, and the punctuation of these periods of the terror of watching him teeter as he climbs up a staircase, or the beauty of actually watching a connection form between a word and an object...this must be what the person must had in mind when he talked about tedium punctuated by a few minutes of terror.