Happy Father’s Day: The Moment You Became a Dad

When was it? Was it the moment you learned about the plus sign on the test? When you felt the baby kick your hand? The fiftieth time someone said, “You’ll see, a baby really changes things.” Was it when you first held the squirmy little girl?

I think it was the moment the ambulance left. I didn’t see you change. I was strapped onto a stretcher watching my heart rate spike on a monitor. With a post-partum hemorrhage, the scariest of homebirth complications threatening, I was nervous. One of the paramedics said, “Talk to her. Get her to calm down.” And the other asked, “So how much did your baby weigh?” I answered and tried to breathe slowly. The midwife sat next to me and held my hand.

You stood with your new daughter wrapped in a blanket as you watched the gurney roll out the front door of the house. At that moment our stories diverged. You missed the ambulance ride because someone had to take care of the baby. She was fine, pink, sleeping. She was entirely yours. I didn’t see you looking around the house for a jammie to put on your seven pound four ounce, three-hour-old daughter. I didn’t see you and the midwife’s assistant install the car seat we didn’t think we’d need so immediately.

As the ambulance passed through intersections and the paramedics kept talking, I wondered what would happen to me at the hospital. Would I be sedated and wheeled to an operating table? I wondered how I could do this to someone. Have a baby and then die. It seemed both tragic and horribly rude.

I didn’t know what you were thinking on your silent ride to the hospital, your new daughter sleeping in the car seat, the midwife’s assistant driving. I didn’t see any of it. We had only three hours as a family of three before you two had to try it alone. I did know that whatever happened to me, you would become whatever that little girl needed.

And you did. That was the moment you became a father, carrying what you had to in your arms and following through that front door into an unknown future. Facing it, taking steps, even if they led somewhere scary. Good fathers go where they have to go whether they want to or not.

Luck, Pitocin, Methergine, maybe a combination of all three. In the emergency room, I relaxed. They parked me in a room and told me the OB would be there in forty-five minutes. That I could wait forty-five minutes meant I would be ok. I breathed easier.

You didn’t. Driving still, wondering where I was, what they were doing, you didn’t know I was fine. You knew the the closing front door, the last sliver of early morning light, the flash of ambulance lights in the driveway.

And at the hospital, when they looked at you, ashen, exhausted, with the newborn sleeping in the crook of your arm, her little duckie hat crooked on her head, and said, “No, you can’t go back there,” you did exactly what any father would do. You made them let you in.