My Husband Caught Our Son

Let me say upfront that I had no business being useful in that room. I am the kind of man who feels faint at blood tests. My plan, my entire fatherly contribution to the birth, was to stand near my wife's head, hold her hand, and try not to pass out and become a second patient.

My wife was magnificent and I was, frankly, terrified. The hours were long. I fed her ice chips, I said encouraging things that I am sure sounded idiotic, I let her crush the bones of my hand and I did not complain even once, which I would like noted for the record.

Then everything sped up. The doctor and nurses moved with a sudden focused energy, and my wife bore down with a sound I had never heard from her in eight years of marriage — something ancient and powerful. And the doctor, glancing up at me, said the words I never expected: do you want to catch your baby?

I did not have time to be scared. For nine months she had done all the carrying — and in one impossible second, the doctor said, here, and placed him into my hands. Guided, of course, with far more competent hands around mine. But it was me. My son arrived into the world and the first place he landed was his father's palms.

He was warm and impossibly heavy for something so small, and slippery, and he was shouting at the unfairness of being born. I laughed and cried at the same time, which I did not know was possible. I put him on his mother's chest, where he belonged, and the three of us just stayed there in a small wet trembling heap.

People ask me what it was like to become a father. I tell them I do not fully know yet, because I think it takes years. But I know the exact moment I felt it begin — not in some quiet abstract way, but physically, in the weight of him in my unsteady hands. I had spent nine months feeling like a spectator. For one second, the doctor let me be the first to hold the whole world.