It's not real, until it is...fatherhood

I'm not one for change.  So when my wife and I were trying to get pregnant, it wasn't that I didn't want to have kids, it was that I 'didn't' have kids yet and to have them would be....a change.  It was something unknown to me.  Not scary, not bad, just different.  When she became pregnant, I of course was excited, my beautiful wife was growing a part of us inside of her.  But the movies, where the expecting Dad wakes up every morning and sings sweet songs to his wife tummy?....that wasn't me.  And I'm a sentimental person, so that says something that  I wasn't doing things like this.  I did however, resort to putting headphones over my wife's tummy with classical versions of Radiohead songs.  Because let's make sure we at least have the basics covered, this kid was going to know good music, but in a refined taste sort of way. 

People would ask me if I was excited, and after spending 7 years in the theatre I knew how to smile, and enthusiastically give my 'yes'.  But the truth of the matter was, I didn't know what I was.  I didn't have the baby growing in me.  I didn't wake up with nausea or feel ill at the smell of a particular food or begin to struggle getting in and out of the car.  I saw my wife experiencing all of these things and my heart ached for her in love I didn't know I had.  But for me, for the expectation of our child being born and the excitement I was supposed to feel; it was simply a blank page.  

At one point I was so distraught over this, that I pulled over on my way home from work to stop at a church, that was not our own, to speak with a priest.  I think I kind of freaked him out, since they were clearly not Baptist or Pentecostal, of which I was a hybrid of.  I just needed at that time, prayer. Prayer that asked me to feel what I was supposed to feel.  That I would be aware of my surroundings, my changing environment.  That I would know that my life will change in the way, the greatest gift changes your life.  In honesty, I'm not sure if that's what the prayer was, but that's what I imagine it probably could have been.  

Two weeks over her due date, we made our scheduled visit to the hospital to have my wife induced.  The experience of her pain, of her discomfort, of her strength and courage and emotion; that is something that forever has changed me.  This was something that I know now is the reason that woman are ten times that of men.  I always loved my wife.  I always respected my wife.  But from that day forward, I knew that I would always revere my wife greater than any other sole on the planet.  She gives life and love with grace and passion.  

For all of my fears though.  For all of my concern that I didn't know what to expect, that this change was something I wouldn't know how to address; it was all washed away the second I lay eyes on my beautiful baby girl.  She was so...HUGE...no really, 10 and a half pounds to be exact.  Due to some breathing issues, she was carried by the nurses first while they worked on her lungs and then they had her under the lights to bath her and weigh put on her first diaper and cap.  It was then, with my index finger just barely touching her belly, did I start to feel something.  I asked the nurse, "can I hold her?".  

She laughed, "of course  you can, she's yours".   She's mine.  WOW. 

That's when I realized why I didn't know what to feel before.  This was emotions that I had never experienced in my life before.  Until this moment, every emotion that I had felt had been a repeated emotion from some other experience in my life.  But not this.  At this time, I was feeling something so foreign, so new, so amazing.  I felt fatherhood for the first time.  There isn't a definition for what you feel when you hold your child.  Love, pride, joy; these are all just words that you could plug in any other space of life.  To hold your child though.  To lay with your wife together for the first time as a family, that is something that is beyond emotion.  It is runs to the core of our souls.  To our very being that was given to us by our maker.  

So when I see expecting Dads, I try to remember not to ask the standard question of, "are you excited?".  Because I know that they don't know, until they know.  It won't be real, until it's real.  What I do try to say to them, is that they are close to the moment that they experience something to amazing, they'll never forget and never be able to duplicate.  That they'll feel their heart in a different manor, they'll see their wife as a saint and that they'll know there is a God, because there is no other way something so incredible could be given to us, ones so undeserving.  Love.