A Million, Billion, Trillion Tiny Feelings Pt. 21

Notes from a father's first pregnancy

It’s often bad.

A parent dies suddenly. You get sick without expecting. The phone call comes to tell you that your best friend decided he would go joyriding after a dozen and a half beers and is never coming home.

Though sometimes it’s good. You get the big break you never thought was coming. Your song from an old album gets used in a movie or the story you forgot you submitted months ago gets published.

Often, it’s unclear. Maybe going to this college or that might have some drastic effect on your life. Taking a certain job over another will have massive impact on the person you are and the person you will become.

These life changes, as are most drastic life changes, are often unexpected.

So, to sit here, knowing that in about five short weeks, my life will forever change is unusual. To see it coming, to stand on the tracks while an irreversible freight train bears down on me is a completely new experience. I can see it coming. I know what it is. But I have no idea what’s it’s going to do to me.

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I know you’re coming, kid. I know that in a few very short weeks you’ll be here in the little rocker beside our bed. I know that we’ll sleep less. I know that we’ll love more. I know all of the things that everyone has told me in the weeks and months leading up to your arrival.

I know that my life is going to change forever and I know why. 

I just have no idea how.

January 5, 2017

One of the few buildings between our home and the University of North Carolina Women’s Hospital, where Emily will deliver our baby, is the Dean E. Smith Center.

The Smith Center, or the Dean Dome as it’s known around town, is the twenty-thousand seat home of the University of North Carolina men’s basketball team.

A stout brick building with an enormous white bubble on top, the Dean Dome is the centerpiece of one of the planet’s most important basketball towns. It’s Chapel Hill’s grandest cathedral. It’s across the street from our house and it will be filled to capacity the night our son is set to arrive.