Time to be a dad
Around the two-month mark of a baby’s life, there comes a magical moment before which life was a lot like holding down a fort during a zombie apocalypse. Swarms of attacks swept through every orifice of the stronghold. There was barely enough ammunition to go around and clearly not enough imagination to predict the possible…
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I’m happy to report that I can finally laugh about my agony during those first two months of my daughter’s life. All those miserable memories have evaporated to the point I almost don’t remember what the big deal was. Perhaps I’ve been acclimated to this lifestyle. Perhaps the fresh wounds have turned into scars. Or…
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If you know me, you probably know how much I hate guessing. And no, it doesn’t get better when my daughter’s life depends on it. So, imagine my delight as I spent much of her first month on guesswork like “Are you hungry?” “Are you sleepy?” “Do you want the ice cream in my hand?”…
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Few things in life challenge the definition of “normal” than newborns. In fact, the most frequent response we received from nurses and midwives was, “That is normal.” I was utterly surprised by my daughter in so many ways which turned out to be normal that I doubted if I was normal. “Does everybody know this?…
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You are right, I think too much. Had I bitten the bullet for the past 6 weeks and kept biting on it to the point of chewing it through and through, my life could have been arguably more tolerable. After all, doing takes less work than doing plus thinking, right? But that ship has long…
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I’m beginning to think a formal introduction between my baby and me could have been a profoundly constructive thing to do. Why the formality (or absurdity), you ask? When I dove into this dad thing head first, I began with an implied expectation for a certain closeness between us, as if our relationship must hit…
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The Calm and the Storm The moment I had my very first skin-to-skin time with my daughter, the whole world quietly froze into a surreal crystal of happiness and bewilderment. The preceding fast-paced, cross-functional, everybody-was-an-expert-except-me-and-I-was-trying-not-to-get-in-anyone’s-way experience in the OR came to a screeching halt when my daughter and I were left to ourselves in the…
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