Many new parents feel like they're fumbling along in the dark. but not everyone can say that they literally are.

Ryan Knighton can.

On his 18th birthday, the Vancouver author was diagnosed with retinis pigmentosa, a congenital disease that has slowly robbed him of his sight.

Knighton chronicled his descent into near total blindness — he still has a sliver of vision in his right eye — in his 2006 memoir, Cockeyed. From the moment that book hit the shelves, readers knew Knighton's voice would be different and special. True, rapidly losing your ability to see makes for a grim subject, but Knighton's dark, almost slapstick humour and complete lack of self-pity along his crash course with disability made the book extremely likeable. It also made its unique window onto the human condition all the more poignant.

His most recent book, C'mon Papa: Dispatches from a Dad in the Dark, moves from the subject of becoming a blind person to becoming a blind parent. From his first solo walk with baby down Vancouver's busy streets to the time he accidentally set her clothes on fire, Knighton's writing is as engaging as ever.

But don't let that lead you to think that the first couple of months were fun and games.

"Pre-language was very hard, because there's no face and there's no recognition," Knighton said to Q guest host Stephen Quinn, explaining the difficulty he had bonding with his daughter at first. "I really felt this molecular realignment when (my wife) figured out how to engineer putting the baby on the floor, standing back, taking a digital photo, handing me the camera, and I would hold it out at arm's length and could slip a little bit of her face inside my sliver of clarity in my right eye. (...) There's something in seeing your baby's face, and seeing both you and your partner's face in this third thing."

In his conversation with Quinn, Knighton admitted that the challenges keep coming. Challenges like trying to keep tabs on an active toddler, and being left with nothing but to trust she'll come when called.

And as Knighton also pointed out, being able to laugh at his failures as a parent, doesn't mean he takes his role as a dad lightly.

"When I lost her in the snow, that wasn't funny. In retrospect it's funny, because everything turned out alright," Knighton said. "I think that's just what happens with time and distance when you tell stories. Their genres change. I really trust comedy as a diagnostic tool; it helps me understand the world. I trust it as a way of criticizing things and thinking of them."

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