We were at the kitchen table, the ultrasound photos spread out between us like a treasure map. The technician had confirmed it with a smile—a boy. I was beaming, already imagining little sneakers in the hallway, a tiny voice calling for “Daddy.” Then I looked over at my husband, Dan, expecting to see the same unguarded joy. Instead, his eyes were fixed on the grainy image, his thumb tracing the outline of the baby’s profile. He smiled, but it was a delayed smile, the kind that arrives after a thought has passed through.
He said, “A boy,” and nodded. Then he stood up, took his coffee mug to the sink, and stood there for a long time looking out at our backyard. I didn’t say anything. Something told me not to.
That was three weeks ago. Since then, I’ve noticed a shift in him. It’s not sadness, exactly, and it’s not avoidance. It’s more like he’s listening for something—a voice he recognizes but has never heard. Because Dan doesn’t have a dad. His father left when he was seven, and whatever contact he had slowly dissolved into birthday phone calls that stopped entirely by the time he was twelve. We’ve talked about it over the years, but always in the abstract, the past, a story he tells without much feeling. But now, with a son on the way, that story is no longer in the past. It’s sitting right there in the nursery, in the empty rocking chair that hasn’t been assembled yet.
The other evening, we were watching TV, and a commercial came on—a father teaching his son how to tie a tie. Dan didn’t say a word, but he pulled out his phone and started scrolling through his camera roll. I caught a glimpse of an old photo he’d recently dug up, likely from his aunt: a picture of him as a scrawny eight-year-old, standing next to a much older man, his grandfather. He wasn’t looking at the kid in the photo. He was looking at the grandfather, the only male parent figure who ever stuck around.
I realized then that this pregnancy isn’t just about us becoming parents. It’s about Dan becoming a father without a template. He’s having to invent something he never had, and the silence of that invention is heavy.
What’s helped is that I’ve stopped trying to fix it. My instinct was to reassure him, to say, “You’re going to be such a good dad because you know what not to do.” And that’s true. But that phrase, “you know what not to do,” doesn’t actually account for the emptiness. It’s like trying to build a house by listing everything that isn’t a stud and a nail. You need to hold the wood in your hands first.
So instead, I’ve been listening more. I ask him simple, neutral questions when we drive somewhere, no eye contact required. “What do you want to show him first?” or “What kind of dad do you want to be, not what kind you don’t?” These are harder to answer, and I can see him chewing on them. Last weekend, he told me that he wants to teach his son how to whistle, because his grandfather taught him, and that’s the only direct memory he has of a man showing him something. Small, but real.
What’s more challenging is the physical side of his grief. Dan has started to bring up his father in unexpected ways, almost as a test. He’ll say, “My dad used to run a lawn business,” or “My dad was really into Motown music.” I used to get tense, sensing a wound, but now I realize he’s just trying to give me context, to stitch together a story for our son later. He’s not seeking pity. He’s seeking acknowledgment.
I recently read some articles on men and pregnancy loss—not loss of a child, but loss of a parent—and how it resurfaces during major life transitions. For men especially, there are few rituals for this kind of grief. Society expects them to move forward, provide, protect. They don’t get the same permission to crumble. What’s helped me understand is to think about the concrete needs. When Dan gets quiet, it’s usually because he’s hit a gap—a moment where he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do because he never saw one. It’s like a file is missing from his mental hard drive.
So we’ve been creating those files, deliberately. Last weekend, we took a drive to his grandfather’s old neighborhood, just to look at the house. We sat in the car across the street, and Dan talked about how, after a ball game, his grandfather would take him for a soft serve cone, no words necessary. It wasn’t nostalgic in a sad way; it was more like he was re-hydrating a memory he wanted to hand down. I didn’t tell him it was a good idea. I just brought a thermos of coffee and shut up.
We also talk about the birth plan, and I’ve noticed that Dan gets more anxious about practical tasks—installing the car seat, painting the wall, choosing a diaper bag. He wants to control what he can. At first, I was annoyed because he’d obsess over the angle of the crib mattress (it’s a flat thing, there is no angle), but I’ve stopped pushing back. This is his way of building. Each task completed is an affirmation: I am here, I am useful, I can protect.
One thing that has made a tangible difference is giving him a specific role that feels ancestral. I asked Dan to write a letter to our son. Not a sentiment, not a list of promises, but a practical guide—like how to change a tire, how to tie a strong knot, how to navigate the unspoken rules of a locker room. It sounds odd, but it’s become his project. He’s writing what he wishes someone had written to him. I came into the living room the other night and saw him at the laptop, typing slowly, deleting, starting over. He wasn’t looking at me. He was doing something men his father’s absence had left undone—carving out a voice from the silence.
I don’t know if he’ll ever fully “resolve” his feelings, and maybe that’s not the goal. He won’t have his father at the delivery room. He won’t get that call, “You’re a dad,” to a person who raised him. And that’s sad, and I let it be sad for him. I don’t try to cheer him up. I just put my hand on his back when he’s standing at the sink, and I say, “I see you in him already.” I don’t explain further. He knows what I mean.
Right now, we’re still in the waiting season. The nursery is half-painted. The car seat sits unopened in the box. Dan has talked about hiring a doula, which he initially didn’t want, and I think it’s because she’ll be a witness, a steady female presence that can hold the space when he feels too shaky to. He’s learning that it’s okay to have help, to model vulnerability for a son who will one day need to know that being a man doesn’t mean being unbreakable.
I’m not going to pretend we’ve reached some tidy understanding. Some days, Dan looks at his own hands like they belong to someone else, like he’s not sure what they’re supposed to do with a baby. But he holds them out to me sometimes, and I take them, and we stand there in the room that will soon smell of baby powder and laundry soap. And I think that’s the work—not erasing the absence, but living with it, folding it into the ordinary moments of laying down a rug, arranging a stack of tiny onesies, waiting for a boy who will know his father in ways his father never knew his own.
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