Prelude

Nothing in life compares to the last few weeks before your first child is born.

It is a singular experience unlike any you will have in your whole life, and I’d never given it one thought until I started living it a week or so ago.

This experience, this in-between time, is truly unique. Big life changes like getting married or moving to a new place or taking a new job can certainly be momentous, but I don’t think they carry the same weight as knowing that you’ll soon be fully responsible for another human life. Other big changes, good or bad, like getting in a horrible accident or winning the lottery might be life-changing as well, but you don’t really get the time to sit and reflect on them before they happen like you do with a baby on the way.

And that’s what makes this time period so special. I know that everything in my life – everything that I feel, everything that I think about myself, everything that I perceive in the world around me – is about to be radically altered. But I just don’t know a.) when exactly it’s going to happen, and b.) just how radical the change will be.

All I do know is that every experience I have now is tinged with thoughts of how that experience will be different, very different, in a very short period of time.

Whether I’m walking down the hall at work, eating breakfast, driving around, or just getting out of bed in the morning, I’m keenly aware of a sense that something is changing in me. Only I can’t quite fully grasp it.

Intellectually, it’s not hard to connect the dots: we will have a newborn baby in our house in the next few weeks. She will require constant care and attention. She will require love and guidance for the rest of my days. My entire life is about to change. Everything I was before and everything I will be going forward, in some manner, will take a back seat to what I will be the moment she arrives: a father. I understand that… intellectually.

Emotionally, though, it’s a whole different ball game.

I used to be annoyed by people that said “You won’t understand until you have kids of your own.” I took it as a slight to my emotional intellect; that somehow I was unable to empathize with what it must be like to care for a child.

That all changed a week or so ago. That moment when you realize, “Oh shit! A few weeks from now, come hell or high water, there’s going to be a brand new living, breathing, person in my house that is dependent on my every decision to survive,” it changes you. It’s no longer an intellectual exercise. Shit is getting real. Real real.

And yet at the same time it can’t possibly be real until it actually happens. Until that moment when we’re back at the house and no one is around and she’s crying and Ashley and I are looking at each other like, “What do we do now?” I still won’t truly know what it feels like to be on my own with a living, breathing, new life.

And that’s the insane part about this time in my life: I know it’s going to be crazy different, but I also know I can’t really feel the full weight of how crazy the crazy will be until it happens. And that is it’s own crazy all by itself. Crazy, right?

It’s a surreal place to exist, and I’m making this post if for no other reason than to document this moment, this odd state of being that is like nothing I’ve experienced before, and like nothing I’ll experience again once she arrives.

Until then I’m stuck here in this strange no-man’s land, waiting it out. Stuck between my old life as I used to know it and a new life that will change me in ways that I can’t even begin to comprehend.

And you know what? I couldn’t be more excited.

I have no illusions that this is going to be easy. I know there will be a ton of good times, but I know there will be a ton of hard times as well.

I also know that we’ll have the love and support of friends and family through all of those times, good or bad, to help guide us along the way.

It’s that love and support that sustains me now during this in-between time, and it’s that love and support that pumps me up for all that is yet to come.

Bring it on.

Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be…
- Robert Browning