I Didn’t Cry When I First Held My Daughter. That’s The Truth.
The delivery room was 62 degrees if it was a degree, I remember that. My wife had been going at it for 17 and a half hours, per the clock above the bed, and she was so out of it she could barely grunt, let alone talk. I was wearing those stupid one-size disposable scrubs they give you, the pants were 4 sizes too big, and I’d tied the drawstring so tight it left a red mark on my waist for 3 days. I’d snuck a crumpled granola bar in my pocket 12 hours earlier, and it had turned to mush from being squished against my hip. I kept shifting from foot to foot, trying not to let the pants fall down, and all I could think was if this baby comes out and my pants are around my ankles, that’s how I’ll be remembered. That’s not the big emotional opening you’re supposed to have, is it?
When she finally came out, the whole room went quiet for half a second, then the nurse said it’s a girl, and she made that little squeak, not even a real cry, just a puff of air like she was annoyed we’d woken her up. First thing I felt was relief. So sharp it made my knees weak. Relief that she was breathing, that my wife wasn’t bleeding out, that the 12 weeks of worrying about every little weird test result was over. That’s it. No lurch in the chest, no waterworks. Just thank God no one died.
They wiped her off quick, plopped her on my wife’s chest first, which was what we’d planned, and I stood there holding my wife’s hand, my palm so sweaty the nurse asked if I was okay. I said yeah, I’m fine, but I wasn’t. I was just tired. I’d been up for 24 hours straight, hadn’t peed in 9 because I didn’t want to miss anything, my back hurt from sleeping in that awful plastic chair the night before when my wife was getting induced. When they wrapped her up in that blanket with the little blue polka dots and handed her to me 10 minutes later, my hands shook so bad I thought I’d drop her. Her head was still all cone-shaped from pushing, and one of her ears was folded over like a taco, and there was that sticky waxy vernix stuff crammed in the crease of her neck, and I had no idea if I was allowed to touch that or if I’d break something if I moved my arm an inch wrong.
I remember the nurse leaned in and said “isn’t she perfect?” and I just nodded and grinned like an idiot, because that’s what you’re supposed to say. But I thought, well, she’s not perfect, not the way the movies do perfect. Her head’s pointy, her skin’s all splotchy, she peed through the blanket two minutes after I held her, right on my stupid too-big scrub pants. I didn’t say that, obviously. I just stood there, holding her, staring at the coffee stain on the toe of my sneaker that a nurse had made when she wheeled the emergency cart in an hour earlier, because I couldn’t make my brain process that this tiny thing was mine. All those months of reading books and building the crib and picking out paint for the nursery, and it still didn’t feel real. It felt like I was holding someone else’s baby, just for a minute, while they went to get coffee.
The guy in the delivery room next door was yelling so loud we could hear him through the walls. “IT’S A BOY! I’M A DAD!” he yelled, and I heard him crying, snotting all over everything I bet, and I felt like a failure. Like I was broken, because I didn’t feel that. My phone was blowing up with texts from my buddies asking if I’d cried yet, and I lied later when I texted back, said yeah, man, totally ugly cried. I didn’t have the heart to tell them the truth: I didn’t cry until an hour after she was born, when my mom walked in, hugged me, and said you did good kid. That’s when I lost it, for like 10 seconds, then I pulled myself together, because that’s what I thought I was supposed to do.
Now she’s four, and she runs around the backyard yelling about dinosaurs and steals my fries when I’m not looking, and I tell her this story sometimes, and she laughs and says “you were scared of me?” and I say yeah, I was. I think a lot of dads don’t talk about this. We see all the posts, all the movies, everyone crying and talking about instant all-consuming love the second they lay eyes on their kid, and if you don’t feel that, you think you’re a bad dad. But what no one tells you is that for a lot of us, it doesn’t work that way. Love doesn’t always hit you like a lightning bolt the first second. Sometimes it creeps in, slow, over a thousand boring little days.
Last week I found that crumpled old scrub top I stuffed in a garbage bag after we left the hospital, don’t even know why I kept it, in the back of our closet. I pulled it out, it still smells like hospital disinfectant and that weird sweet newborn smell that only lasts a week. I didn’t cry. I just stood there for a minute, then folded it back up and put it away, because she was yelling from the kitchen that she wanted toast with too much jelly. I went and made it.
That’s the thing. That’s the real story. I didn’t cry the first time I held her. I still don’t cry at the big, scripted stuff. But I’ll cry when she scrapes her knee falling off her bike and looks up at me like the world ended, I’ll cry when she draws me a terrible picture of a cat that looks like a potato and writes “DAD” on it in crooked crayon, I’ll love her through all the boring, messy, unperfect stuff that no one posts about. That’s enough, right? I think it is. (Word count: 1128)
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