'I wanted her to learn to be responsible for walking with me in a way that was different than how she does with Tracy.' But what toddler obeys rules? 'She would say, 'I don't want to hold your hand!' ' he recalls. 'I didn't want to use leashes, and be the un-fun parent,' he says. Going from the BabyBjorn carrier strapped to his chest to the task of walking with Tess when she became a toddler was a major challenge. Knighton's growing relationship with his daughter as she learns his limitations. Playing with Tess, I still feel like I'm not totally there, because my sense of what a full experience of playing with her would be like tugs at me.' 'It's weird to be in a house with somebody where you feel like you miss them. Still, he often feels lonely in his darkened world. 'I didn't feel connected to Tess for a while, and then when Tracy figured out how to jimmy the digital camera in a way that I could actually get a little piece of Tess in the sliver of sight I had left at the time, that made all the difference in the world.' 'I felt a strange ambivalence in the beginning,' he acknowledges. He also had to deal with not being able to see the object of his affection. The first time, it was hard, because she's like, 'That's your kid and you're her father, but it's my kid too and a blind man wants to take her for a walk.' ' 'I can't just say, 'I'm comfortable enough with walking Tess today.' Tracy had to be comfortable too. That responsibility made his relationship with his wife more complex. But now I had to learn to be responsible for somebody else.' Embarrassment and boredom were my two main enemies, and as soon as I learned to deal with those two issues, blindness was just a mobility issue. … InĬockeyed, the cure for blindness was me learning to risk things for my own independence. It's not like you change diapers because it's your turn and Tess has to wear an upside down diaper just to prove I can do it. We did it because we felt that Tess didn't have to suffer for me to express my independence. 'I had to be the breadwinner and Tracy did all the classically maternal, fifties house-mom stuff.

When Tess arrived, we had to go to this fifties model,'he says. The arrival of their daughter turned their world upside down, making his role even harder to navigate. It was about new boundaries of responsibility.'

And I realized that everything Tracy and I were going through was just a hyperbole of what other new parents were going through.

How am I going to do all this? It was overwhelming. 'I could foresee so many things that were going to happen. He began to write the book when his wife, Tracy, was pregnant.

Cockeyed memoir