I Thought I’d Cry When I First Met My Newborn. I Didn’t.
It was 2 a.m. and the delivery room linoleum was so cold my socked feet had gone numb. I’d stuffed a crumpled peanut butter granola bar in my hoodie pocket four hours earlier, when we’d raced out of the house after my wife’s water broke, and it was leaking sticky crumbs all over my hip. I kept shifting my weight trying to avoid it, which made the nurse side-eye me a couple times.
Everyone had told me what that first moment would feel like. My best friend had texted me a week before, saying he’d ugly-cried so hard his contacts slipped out when he held his daughter. My dad said he’d stood there and couldn’t speak for 10 minutes, his throat was so tight. I’d watched a hundred casual videos of new dads sobbing into their baby’s hair, so I spent the last month of my wife’s pregnancy mentally preparing to be that open, that overwhelmed. I even practiced a dumb little speech I was gonna say, something soft about how we’d waited for her and we’d love her forever.
When they pulled her out, it was nothing like the movies. She was purple and covered in that thick white waxy stuff, and she sounded like a tiny angry goose when she squawked. The first thing I said out loud was “wow she’s really loud” and my wife laughed so hard she winced from her stitches. Then the nurse wiped her down quick and walked over to me, holding her out, and said “wanna hold your daughter?”
My hands were shaking so bad I almost dropped her when I put my arms out. And here’s the thing no one tells you to prepare for: I had needed to pee so bad for the last two and a half hours. I didn’t want to leave my wife alone during pushing, so I’d just held it. When that baby settled warm and squirming on my chest, the first thought that popped into my head wasn’t oh my god I love her. It was if I pee my pants right now in front of all these people, my wife is gonna tease me about this at every family dinner until I die. I held my breath for like 15 seconds just waiting to see if the urge would pass. It didn’t, but luckily nothing embarrassing happened.
I looked down at her, waiting for that big rush of love everyone talks about. The knot in my throat, the tears, all that. It didn’t come. I counted her fingers, counted her toes, like the nurse told me to, checked that they were all there. They were. I felt relief, mostly. Relief that she was okay, that my wife was okay, that the nine months of quiet worrying ended without something going wrong. But love? That immediate, can’t-breathe love everyone posts about? I felt like I was holding a really important stranger. Like someone had handed me the keys to a fancy car I didn’t know how to drive, and I was just scared I’d mess it up.
The nurse took her over to the warmer to check her weight and clean out her nose a little more, and I stood by the side leaning against the counter, picking at the sticker on my plastic water bottle. My mom was blowing up my phone, 12 texts in a row asking for photos, for updates. I snuck a couple quick texts back, felt guilty for it immediately, like I should be having a transcendent moment right now instead of checking my screen. But what was I gonna do? Stand there and stare and wait for the feeling to hit?
It took three days for that feeling to hit, actually. Not the first minute, not the first hour. The third night we were in the hospital, my wife was asleep after a long day of parade of visitors, the baby was fussy, wouldn’t latch, and the nurse said to take her for a slow walk around the unit or rock her to calm down. I sat in that stiff plastic rocking chair by the window, the only light seeping in from the vending machine out in the hall, and I bounced her, and I started singing that stupid song my grandpa used to sing to me when I was little—only I can only remember the first verse, so I just repeated it over and over off-key.
She stopped squirming after a minute, and looked up at me, and her little hand wrapped all the way around my thumb, and I felt that warm, tight thing spread out from my chest to my arms, and that’s when I cried. Quiet, into the top of her fuzzy little head, so I wouldn’t wake my wife up.
I see all these posts now, new dads talking about that instant all-consuming love, and I don’t blame them for feeling that. That’s just how it works for some people. But for a lot of us, it’s not. I lied on my Facebook post that first day, said I was over the moon, overflowing with love. I was over the moon, but I was also terrified, and confused, and I still had crumbs in my pocket, and I felt like an imposter who didn’t know what he was doing. No one talks about that part. No one tells you it’s okay if the big feeling takes a minute to show up.
Last week I was changing her diaper on the living room floor, she’s 18 months now, and she grabbed my whole hand with hers and tried to bite my thumb, and I thought about that first day in the delivery room: the cold feet, the crumbs, the need to pee, the empty space where the love was supposed to be. It’s not that the first moment wasn’t important. It’s just that love doesn’t always show up when you expect it to. Sometimes it shows up when you’re repeating a stupid half-remembered song in a rocking chair at 3 a.m. Sometimes it shows up when you’re cleaning up mashed banana off the couch three months later. That’s okay. I don’t need the perfect first moment to have the real thing, I guess. Or whatever. It’s just how it is.
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