A Million, Billion, Trillion Tiny Feelings Vol. 22

Notes from a father's first pregancy

January 24, 2018

There are, on average, ten babies born in the University of North Carolina Women’s Hospital every single day, which helps put all of this into perspective. It’s comforting to know that so many people are experiencing what we’re experiencing.

It’s also humbling to be reminded of how completely un-unique your experiences are.

January 30, 2018

Now that all of the baby showers are in the past, the final visits from friends and family, the last of the weekend booze-a-thons from out of town pals are counted and behind us, it’s only the three of us. Me, Emily and baby.

We’re just waiting for his arrival.

February 1, 2018

On our doctor’s advice, it’s been decided that, should a natural labor not occur, we will induce Emily on the eleventh of this month. Meaning we should have a son in our arms no later than February fourteenth. Emily is firm in her opposition of our son being a Valentine’s Day baby.

“Think of the pressure,” she says. “No way, man. It’s a stupid fucking fake holiday, anyway.”

I’m hoping for him to come just one day earlier, February thirteenth. It’s the day my parents were married and has been a particularly tough one for my father since my mother’s death. It’d be nice to give my old man a reason to smile that day.

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My mother had a funny way of looking at life, kid. Where most people saw pain or filth, trash or refuse, my mother saw beauty, promise, prospect. She looked at death in much the same way.

“When someone dies, they’re making room for a new baby in the world,” she’d always say. And despite our chiding her for not taking the world’s population growth into consideration when positing this theory, she was steadfast in it.

“When I go,” she’d say in her sick years, “there’s going to be some beautiful little boy or little girl in the world. And they’ll be here because I’m not. And I’m okay with that.”

I often look around at little boys and girls who are now six or so and I wonder which one of them replaced my mother. I smile and I think that in some roundabout way, by my mother’s ridiculous estimation, she gave them the room in the world to exist. I thank them in my mind for giving her solace in the face of fear and I implore them to do good in the world, to earn the place that used to be hers, to be noble and kind and to honest and to find the beauty that is out there. Because as my mother taught me, there’s beauty in the filth. You just have to have the patience to look for it.