I’m not ashamed to admit that I still purchase compact discs when I buy new music. I’m also not embarrassed to reveal that I’ve got my favorite 300 organized alphabetically by artist on a metal shelf here in my office. The group includes Martin Sexton, Lucinda Williams, Josh Ritter and Emmylou Harris. There’s some Richard Shindell in there, too. And Springsteen, of course.

For years, I’ve known where every one of these CDs was located on the shelf. Knowing my CDs always are in perfect order has comforted me during some of the more stressful evenings of work in recent years.

Now, however, with L terrorizing everything she can get her hands on, the state of my CD collection has become an indication of how much fatherhood has changed me forever.

To wit: one of the baby’s new favorite activities is speed-crawling into my office, bee-lining for the CD rack, and knocking about half of the discs from the rack onto the floor. As the plastic jewel cases hit the carpet, she laughs uncontrollably. Every now and again, she seeks out particular CDs and bites them for good measure (Paul Simon’s “Surprise” fits this bill; it boasts the image of a baby’s face and that seems to resonate with L).

Because L plays this game daily, I don’t even bother to re-alphabetize the CDs every night. Instead, I just stack them up and toss them back in the rack at random; to me, there’s no reason to reorganize when I know L will just mess them up again the next day.

For most of you reading this, I’m sure my reaction sounds like no big deal. Trust me, though, in my little neurotic world, this is huge news.

Relinquishing control! Accepting disorder! Embracing chaos! All things I swore I’d never do.

And yet, for L, I do them gladly, knowing she could care less about how the CDs are organized on the shelf, so long as they’re there for her to pull down and play with every day.

Does it irk me that, as I write this, a Josh Rouse CD (“Dressed up Like Nebraska”) is next to a Kathleen Edwards disc (“Failer,” which, by the way, is upside down and backwards)? On some level, yes, it always will. But I’m learning gradually that this whole fatherhood business makes us dads do strange and unusual things. If this isn’t love, people, I don’t know what is.