It struck me today at the doctor’s office. This is it. It’s almost done.
This time in exactly two weeks, I thought, the sun will be going down on the most surreal day of my life. I’ll be spending my first night with our newborn son.
It’s weird. We spent a year hoping and praying (and, y’know, trying) to get pregnant. Then when it finally happened, we spent most of this year preparing to become parents. A string of baby showers. A mural on the wall of the nursery. A doctor’s visit every other week. And now that it’s here it still seems so beautifully bizarre that it’s about to happen for real.
There will be a new little dude in the world I’d absolutely die for.
There will be a sense of love that goes beyond anything I can describe.
There will be a whole new rhythm to life- a pretty erratic and unpredictable rhythm, I’m betting, that changes everything I’ve gotten used to.
I wanted to capture some of what I feel. At this exact moment. Days before my son is born.
I feel ready.
I feel that in many ways you can never really be 100% ready, but as much as anyone can be ready, I’m ready.
Today, my friend H was telling me about how his life changed after his daughter was born. “I’ve never loved this much,” he kept saying. “I never knew I could love this much. It’s something I can’t really understand, like the concept of infinity or how the universe just keeps on going on forever.”
It’s not the first time I’ve heard that, and I’ve heard nearly every new parent say something to that effect. I believe that what they say is totally true, and I also think there’s no way I’ll fully get it until two weeks from now when I experience it for myself.
I’m ready for that. I’m ready for my mind to be blown, for my heart to come alive, and to feel that electricity. I’m ready to have mystery and wonder back in my life like that, and then some. I’m ready to learn new things about God, love, and wonder from this experience.
I’m excited to have a window to see the world from the perspective of a little man. Learning to breathe and eat and crawl. Then walk and explore and express himself. Then adventure and help others and create. I’m excited to see old things again fresh, like it was the very first time.
I’m ready to have all the other things I do in life matter less and more at the same time.
They matter less, because at the end of my day, my number one job is being a husband and dad. My main metric of success won’t be web visitors, views, revenue, or anything like that. It’ll be how present I was.
And they matter more, because everything I do will be shaping the world I pass on to my kid. I want him to develop a creative spirit, to realize the importance of doing work that helps other people, to appreciate the vastness of our world and all the different people we share it with.
I’m ready to have the unessential things fade away, and to have the urgency to keep only the things that matter in focus. This is something I already try pretty hard to practice, so I’m curious to see how the baby makes that even more true.
I’m ready for our family unit to grow. For the past five years, most of my life has revolved around putting down roots. Prior to that, I was happy to move around a lot, collecting valuable but temporary experiences. There’s a part of all this that still feels a bit foreign. Knowing in my head that this kid isn’t just a tiny roommate who stays with us for a couple years then moves on. He stays and grows and turns into whoever he ends up being. This relationship will outlast just about all the other ones in my life.
I’m ready.
I’m capturing this all down, stream of consciousness, because I want to have a record of my heart and mind just before the baby arrives. The calm and the chaos and the sleepless nights and the figuring-it-out amidst the sweetness.
It’ll for sure be different.
Last night, I rested my hand on Deanna’s pregnant belly. It brought me back to a moment from the summer of last year. We had been trying to get pregnant for about five or six months at that point, and another one had just gone by where we realized it wasn’t happening that month either.
“You’re going to be so cute when you get pregnant,” I told her, able to imagine so clearly how she’d look.
“If I get pregnant,” she corrected me.
“Yeah, sure,” I acknowledged half-heartedly. Even though I was plenty discouraged, there was at least one small part of me that couldn’t let go of the feeling that it was supposed to happen. It was going to happen. I wanted to be open, humble to the fact that I wasn’t in control. But a part of me deep down must’ve known.
Last night, as I felt his head and feet protrude, I remembered all that. I was right. This is really happening.
And our lives are about to change.