Episode One: You'll Never Know a Love (and Stress) Like This
Starting at the beginning with the day(s) of birth
The common saying is that the day your child(ren) was born is the happiest day of your life.
Yeah, well, no.
Is my son being born one of the happiest changes in my life? Yes, but the day of his birth was also easily one of the most stressful and chaotic days of my life.
In reality, I’m not sure where the narrative began that the moment your kid is born is this joyous and profoundly moving experience. Maybe it is for some people, but I know that we weren’t the only people who had a much different experience.
Much like with most events in my life, I’m sure my expectations were warped from movies and personal anecdotes of friends and acquaintances.
Every movie birth involves like six seconds of aggressive pushing, the baby being born vaginally, and both parents just looking down at their child with tears of happiness in their eyes and huge smiles on their faces.
It falls perfectly in line with the narrative we hear so often that, “you’ll fall in love the second you see your child” or “the minute he’s born you’ve never known a love like that.”
I don’t know who these people are who are serving that narrative but ingesting it fucked me up.
On some level, I was expecting my son’s birth to be this kind of magical moment, which, when you think about it is such a silly expectation to have. I mean, I obviously understood the physical pain that my wife would be enduring but somehow my subconscious still expected a moment when we both looked at him and smiled.
Instead, our situation involved a reaction from me like this.
What’s amusing about this being the way reality played out for me is that I really wasn’t anxious or nervous in the months and weeks leading up to the birth. Even when we went for a regularly scheduled OB visit and were told we needed to head to the hospital for my wife to be induced, I wasn’t nervous.
We were prepared for this. We had gone to the classes. We had read the books. We had the apartment ready (OK, we built the bassinet after this doctor’s appointment). In fact, we were so calm that we left that doctor’s office, went home, casually packed and made some lunch, and then headed to the hospital.
We were on our way to that movie script birth that was the most joyous experience of our lives. I was going to be the beaming father, holding his newborn son and feeling a paternal love that I had always felt ready for.
Until essentially none of that happened.
My wife was in labor for 36 hours. We saw rotating teams of doctors and nurses come and go. She was poked and prodded and checked for dilation. I did my best to keep her hydrated, comfortable, and breathing calmly. I went out and got her some broth because she couldn’t eat solid foods. Other than that, I basically just sat on a cold and plastic-feeling leather couch and offered affirmations.
The movies don’t tell you about the hours (or days) of feeling useless.
After hours in which our son’s heart rate spiked and slowed and then spiked and slowed again, we consented to our doctor’s suggestion that my wife get a c-section.
It was a little after three in the morning, and as she was being prepped for surgery, I was being fitted into one-piece medical coveralls and a lunch lady hat. Only, the fucking things didn’t fit.
By the time I pulled the coveralls over my thighs and then slipped my arms in, the synthetic fabric was pulled so tight across my crotch that my wife and our doula started to laugh and then decided to take photos. (I’ll spare you those).
It was like being 18 years old again and trying to get a pair of jeans at Hollister, but everything was made for a 140-pound frame. Which was a nice emotional addition to an already stressful situation.
After the medical staff allowed me to unzip the coveralls and wear them essentially as just pants, they gave me a separate top that fit and then escorted me to a quiet hallway where I sat on a chair outside the operating room like a kid awaiting detention.
Nothing can quite prepare you for the moment you walk into that room. The number of doctors and nurses in there. The number of machines that beep. Your partner essentially strapped to a table with IVs and cords weaving around like a spider web.
You don’t know what the beeps mean or how to respond to the conversations you hear the doctors having with one another or how to assure your partner everything is fine.
And then you hear a cry.
The next few moments were a whirlwind for me.
Somebody showed me my son and then took him away to apply ointment to his eyes and check his vitals and do whatever else needed to be done. I talked to him while he was crying while trying to tell my wife what was happening and also make sure she was still doing OK. When I was finally able to hold him, I tried to position him so my wife could see him too, but she couldn’t touch him because she was still strapped down to the table.
There were moments of joy, sure. He was here with us, but there were equal moments of panic. My wife was exhausted. She felt cold. Her teeth were chattering. She was having trouble taking deep breaths.
We were assured that all of it was normal given the circumstances, but none of it felt normal. There was so much going on and no time to process anything. When the nurses took my son back and escorted me to the recovery room to wait for my wife, I broke down. It felt like I hadn’t taken a breath in hours and the breath finally escaped my lungs just as the tears came.
What the fuck had just happened?
A friend of mine once said to me that being a parent is the only thing in the world where your life irreversibly and unimaginably changes in one instant.
That is not a bullshit narrative.
Even when my wife was out of surgery and the three of us were all in a room together that moment where the calming love of parenthood washed over me never came. I was still on edge, and I started to doubt whether or not I would be a good father.
Wasn’t I supposed to be overcome by this immediate love? Shouldn’t I have felt like a different person? Wasn’t there some sort of transformative moment I was meant to experience?
Despite looking forward to the idea of being a dad for the majority of my adult life, I started to wonder if I was better as the babysitter or the fun uncle. What if I wouldn’t actually feel the love that I thought I could? Maybe I was too selfish?
I would find reasons to leave the hospital - going to get us coffees or bring stuff from the apartment - just because the fresh air of being outside felt restorative in a way. But through it all, I worried about when this switch would flip inside of me.
In truth, I’m not sure it ever did because I’m not sure the switch exists. It might be more like somebody slowly increasing a dimmer.
I don’t remember any moment where I could feel this profound shift or where I could pinpoint acknowledging my new existence as a dad. But in those first few weeks we were back home, the worry was replaced by joy and deep love. I mean, not fully replaced but the balance felt a little better.
And I can’t help but wonder if those first few days may have felt different if I didn’t have this narrative in my head. If I didn’t have this expectation of instantaneous love like some latent parenting gene would just burst to the surface.
I’m not sure why we do this, traffic in pleasant and over-simplified narratives. Most of my early anxieties as a parent have been from buying into them too much, and maybe that’s on me. But I also think we try to make complicated moments easily digestible when that can often do more harm than good.
The day your child is born may well be the greatest day of your life. It could also be the worst. It could fall somewhere in between. You may feel more fear than joy. You may feel moments of regret or doubt.
I have to imagine all of it is natural because, frankly, none of it is natural. Your life has become something completely different in the blink of an eye, and everybody is going to process that differently, narrative be damned.