January 9, 2026
Dear Sophia,
Got up a bit late, holding your mother, talking to her, feeling grateful to be with her. Everything happening now is because of her.
I was feeling the feelings a moment ago, as I tried to work (first a brief, now turning to e-discovery). I stopped working and the tears came. I don’t know the origin. Fear, change, optimism, sadness, anticipation, anxiety?
Nervous. Not wishing it to happen faster, exactly. Why?
I realize: I’m a little hesitant to enter, let alone express, so much feeling. Just as I knew I would cry at my wedding, as most feeling people with a sense of biography and legacy would do, I intuit that the birth of my child will probably be the most emotional ten (or twenty!) hours I’ll have ever … spent? … endured?
So many fears, of course. So much joy. And the ends of so many journeys — how we got here, who helped us, what obstacles we overcame — intersecting with the beginnings of so many other stories: my life with you, my daughter, your mother’s life with you, your life after I’m gone. Moments chock-full of meaning and memories.
You occupy all of the available space inside your mother. You’re crowded in there! Every movement hits your mom hard, in several places. She felt this once a few nights ago, an excruciating but short-lived pain. Three times the next night.
And last night you seemed to be training in the world’s smallest boxing gym. Your two jobs down to punchin’ and lunchin’.
The Pacing Father-to-Be
We went to the Verizon store to get our new phones, then to Target to look for accessories and to get Leah a “pink drink” at the Starbucks inside. As we walked out, I thought, I’m really stressed. I noticed I was short-fused and quiet. More so than usual, though? I couldn’t put my finger on it. But noticing it, I felt emotional.
It happened again as I chopped vegetables to make turkey chili back home. I was reflecting on feeling stressed, became more aware of the feeling in my body, and felt tears could have come up. I recall I also had tears in the shower this morning.
Somehow I had forgotten about the societal meme of the anxious expectant father, pacing in the waiting room.
The baby’s due date came and went three days ago, so I’m now that cliche.
All the things that could go wrong are low probabilities, each and every one, but they feel like they add up.
The chance your mother’s water could break without labor progressing for over 24 hours, or that she could need an induction for other reasons, and be denied the natural home birth she so wants.
The chance she could tear, or need an episiotomy, in which a medical professional cuts her under the theory that it will prevent a tear, but which, confusingly, could just make it worse.
The chance forceps or a vacuum could be used to pull you out.
The chance my wife is really hurt, or worse.
The chance she could need a c-section.
The chance you could be hurt coming out.
The chance you have some birth defect we weren’t told about.
The chance it’s my fault, for having insisted on using my silver-haired sperm to make a baby instead of finding a medical student on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace.
Could I have forgotten the cliche of the expectant dad pacing in the waiting room because I’ve known for months that, barring unforeseeable complications, I won’t be using a place with a waiting room?
And I won’t be relying on others to bring our child into the world?
No, your mother does not believe birth is an emergency, as she puts it.
It’s her dream to give birth at home, and I, far from being a bystander, have become her coach and supporter and baby-catcher.
That makes for a different kind of pacing. Like before a big football game, or a presentation, or a court trial . . . but bigger still.
I have read the books. I have taken the home-birth and natural-birth and breathing classes with her.
I’m not just going to be pacing around as experts do the work, which had been what I thought was my dream.
I’m going to perform. I have to, in a sense, deliver.
