No One Asked How I Was Doing After the Baby

When my son was born, our house filled with people overnight. My mother, my mother-in-law, aunts, neighbours with steel tiffins. Everyone asked the same kind, correct questions. How is the baby feeding. How is she recovering. Is she getting rest, is she eating well, is she healing. These were the right questions to ask. I want to be clear about that.

But I noticed, over those first weeks, that no one ever turned to me. Not unkindly — it simply did not occur to anyone. I was the one who carried bags down to the car, who paid the bills, who went back to the office after four days because that is what men in my family do. "At least you can escape to work," a cousin laughed. I laughed too. I did not say that the office was where I sat in the parking lot some mornings unable to make myself go in.

I was not sad about anything I could name, which somehow made it worse, because if you cannot name it you cannot ask anyone to help you carry it. I loved my son. I loved my wife. And still I felt like I was watching my own family through a window from outside, useful and invisible at the same time. I slept badly. I snapped at small things and then hated myself for snapping.

There is a story we tell here about fathers — that we are the strong ones, the steady ones, the ones who do not get to fall apart because someone has to stay standing. I believed it. So I said nothing for months. I told myself that a man complaining about his feelings while his wife had done the actual, enormous work of giving birth was shameful. I still partly believe that, and I am still trying to unlearn it.

What finally moved me was a small thing. My wife found me sitting in the dark in the baby's room at 3 a.m., not holding him, just sitting. She did not say "what's wrong with you." She said, "I don't think anyone has asked you how you are. So I'm asking." And I cried in a way I had not since I was a boy. We talked. Later I spoke to a counsellor on the phone, which I had thought was not for people like me.

I am sharing this anonymously because I am not fully past the embarrassment, and that is honest. But if you are a father reading this in the dark, useful and invisible and quietly not okay, I want to be the person who turns to you and asks. How are you doing? Not the baby. You. Please do not wait as long as I did to answer.