I Didn’t Cry When I First Held My Daughter. That’s The Truth.
It was 3:17 a.m. I remember that because the clock above the delivery room door glowed red, and I’d stared at it so long through the last four hours of labor that the number burned into my head. I’d spilled half a styrofoam cup of hospital coffee on my only clean gray sweatshirt an hour earlier, the stain spreading right over the logo of my old college football team, and I was so hungry I could’ve eaten the sad vending machine granola bar I’d been hoarding in my pocket even though it had expired the month before. When the doctor said okay, let’s meet this kid, my first thought wasn’t oh my god it’s my baby, it was don’t trip over the oxygen line by the bed. That’s the stuff no one posts about, right?
They wiped her off quick, wrapped her in that scratchy hospital blanket that’s always too big, and plopped her right on my chest. She was slippery through the fabric, warm enough that I could feel her little heart beating way faster than mine, and she smelled nothing like the baby powder and lavender I expected from all the ads. She smelled like antiseptic and that waxy vernix stuff the nurse said was good for her skin, and a little bit like the vanilla lip balm my wife had been sucking on all through labor. I’d practiced holding a rubber baby doll in our birthing class, for God’s sake, I knew how to cradle the neck, but when she was actually there, I held my arms so stiff my shoulders ached for three days after. My hands are calloused from building decks for a living, I lift 50 pound bags of concrete every day, and I was convinced if I squeezed even a little too hard I’d break her.
The nurse leaned in, grinning, and said “what do you think, dad?” And all I could come up with was “hi.” That was it. Just hi. No speech, no tears, not even a little lump in my throat. I just stood there, stiff as a board, holding this tiny warm human, thinking about the $75 parking ticket I got when I pulled into the wrong lot on the way in, how we couldn’t afford that right now with all the hospital bills coming. I’d seen all those reels on Instagram before she was born, all the dads sobbing the second they hold their kid, their faces all splotchy, captions that say “best day of my life” and I immediately thought I was broken. I’d spent the whole nine months before that lying awake at night wondering if I’d be any good at this anyway, so that empty feeling just felt like proof I was right to worry. What’s wrong with me? Why don’t I feel the thing I’m supposed to feel?
The TV in the corner was playing a rerun of a Yankee game, volume down so low you could just hear the murmur of the announcer. My wife was half asleep, crying happy tears, her hair stuck to her forehead, and she kept saying “she’s so tiny, look at her” and I kept saying “yeah” but I couldn’t shake that off-kilter feeling. I remember I accidentally brushed my knuckle against her cheek, too hard, and she squawked, all red in the face, and I panicked so bad I tried to hand her back to the nurse like “sorry, I messed her up already.” The nurse laughed, but my face burned for ten minutes after that.
People ask me this all the time, you know? When we’re at backyard cookouts, or someone’s having a new baby, and the question comes up: what was it like the first time you met yours? For the first five years, I lied. I said I cried, said it was the most overwhelming feeling I ever had, said my whole life made sense all of a sudden. I don’t know why I lied, really. I guess I didn’t want people to think I don’t love her, which is the opposite of the truth. But it’s the truth: I didn’t feel that big grand lightning bolt love the second I held her. It took time.
She’s seven now. She loses at Uno and flips the board, she draws me three-headed dinosaurs she says are “daddy dinosaurs” and they hang on my fridge by the door, she can outrun me on our morning walks now and teases me for getting winded. Last week she beat me at Mario Kart and laughed so hard she snort-laughed, and I looked at her and that’s when the big warm overwhelming feeling hit me, not that night in the hospital, right there in the living room with pizza crumbs on the couch.
I don’t think most dads talk about this. We’re supposed to have this big dramatic moment, we’re supposed to be overcome right away, or we’re bad dads. But for a lot of us, it’s just… a lot. You’re tired, you’re hungry, you’re scared you’re gonna break the tiny human, you can’t even process that the thing you’ve been waiting nine months for is actually here. All the expectations pile up, and then you’re just standing there in a coffee-stained sweatshirt saying “hi” and wondering how you’re gonna pay the parking ticket.
Last month we were cleaning out the garage to move old boxes up to the attic, and I found that crumpled parking ticket from that night, stuffed in the pocket of that old stained sweatshirt I never threw away. My daughter saw it, asked what it was, and I told her it was from the day I met her. She squinted at it, said “that’s boring, can we get chocolate ice cream?” And that’s pretty much the whole story, isn’t it? It wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t the movie moment everyone talks about. It was just ours. I wouldn’t change it.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » I Didn’t Cry When I First Held My Daughter