First Week as a Dad?

I've learned more lessons in one week as a father than in entire years of my life before.

Tiny, tiny hands reach out and little fingers wrap around my own much larger one. My boy blinks at the brightness of the world and coos sweetly. Thirty seconds later, his little face scrunches into a mass of wrinkles, and he lets out a hearty wail: it's diaper time.

I'm starting to detect some of the subtle differences in my son's wails and screams after just seven days.

Wah-waaah = "Dad, my diaper is full."

AAaaggWWaaaGGGHH = "I have so much gas!"

Aaaa-Ahh-Wahhhh-aaaa-wahhhhh = "Where is my mother, the vessel of bounty?"

ARRGHHHA = "Why is life like this?"

I never really set out to be a father. It wasn't something I thought about much. Some days, I still feel like I'm barely a breath away from being a kid myself, learning hard lessons about the world in-between happy sessions of Dungeons and Dragons or exploring the wilderness of my Northern California homeland.

Being a dad seemed like some strange monolith glimpsed through fog. More fiction than fact. Now, suddenly, it's here. I'm standing before it, humbled and in awe.

My whole life, I've been driven by the idea that "bettering oneself" is the whole point of existnece. I believe that if we were all to take up the cause of bettering ourselves and our fellows, our world would be a better and brighter place.

To be a father is to continually seek betterment.

In my life pre-fatherhood, I sought betterment on the scale of years and months, with an optimistic eye toward self-improvement on the day or hour.

As a father: betterment is a process fully alive within each second; each moment.

Nothing calls up the need for self-awareness and presence of mind more than a little baby screaming in your ear and then balling up his fist and socking you in the jaw (my son is surprisingly gifted in the pugilism department for a newborn).

I must also consider my role as caretaker and space holder for my partner.

I went through the whole birth process with my wife. We labored at home for the better part of 24 hours, and then accompanied our Douala to the hospital. There, after about five more hours of labor, I caught my son as he first entered the world and cut the umbilical cord that connected him to the womb.

Every minute of that labor, I worked alongside my wife. I held her as she roared; she bore all her weight upon my sore and shaking arms as she learned to give her body over to the experience of birth.

And yet, for all the strenuous physicality of those hours that I experienced, it hardly compares to the immensity of hers. Now in postpartum, my work as space holder is far from over.

I am my wife's confidant and caretaker. Her nurse and patient listener.

I clean and cook for three while she heals.

I drink black tea past midnight and burp our new baby in the kitchen as he cries, as far from his mother's sleeping ears as possible.

Eventually, her hormones will become regulated once again. Within a couple of weeks, her body will heal itself enough for her to take walks again and enjoy the shifting of the autumn into winter. But, for now, she relies on me to hold her – in more than simply the physical.

The midwives at the hospital told me that there were five other mothers laboring at the same time as my wife. Of those five, not one partner was involved in the labor.

This astounds me.

Do those women's partners not care?

Do they not realize all the incredible cosmic wonder they, themselves, are missing?

There is a saying that my wife and I try to live by: fear is the mind-killer. I wonder how much fear plays a part in the absence of men from their partner's sides.

Of course, fear is also ever-present in my new-father mind.

Is my baby overheated? Will I hurt him if I swaddle him too tight? What if my arthritic fingers lose their grip on his little body, which is at once so sturdy and yet so terrifyingly frail?

I am afraid of other things as well: will I lose my temper at his constant screaming? Will his mother heal well and find her center soon? Will we have enough money and community to survive the encroaching horrors of the world?

We cannot banish fear, so we shouldn't even try.

Fear, as a father, is something I must learn to let flow through me and away. It will come, like the swell of an ocean wave. It will go, just the same. What remains is the ever-present lighthouse of my being, that which exists behind the thought "I am."

Being present for my son's birth was incredible. No fear or force could have kept me from that experience by my wife's side. None of these other fears will hold me back as I seek self-betterment in fatherhood. I will let my fears pass through me until only I remain.

As I look toward the weeks and years ahead, it occurs to me how gentle true strength actually is. To be a father is to be stronger than you ever knew you could be. But this strength is the strength of water flowing, of stars shining, of trees bending in the wind. The strength of fatherhood is neither thought nor muscle: it is the cultivation of perfect presence in the middle of a storm.

I am rightly exhausted at all times. My mood is constantly swinging between extremes. My body is weary, my back aches, and my heart aches to take all my wife and child's postpartum pains away.

You cannot fight these things. You can only let them be there with you as you cultivate the infinite patience in infinite combinations needed to make it through the day. If I were to hold to some rigid idea of what strength looked like, of what fatherhood should be... I think this storm of life would snap me like an old branch in a gale. So instead, I bend with the wind and find patterns of peace in the currents around me.

I give myself moments of rest to write, to sleep... to simply sit and stare at the wall with an audiobook playing in my ears.

I care for my family with the strength they need: the strength I've cultivated in listening, in processing, in pausing before reacting, in holding space for the emotions of others. These strengths are ancient, vast, and deep. I know that I can trust them to see me through.

And to all those prospective or new dads out there? I have faith that you can, too.

👋 Hi there!
I’m Odin Halvorson, a librarian 📚, independent scholar 📖, film fanatic 🎬, fiction author 📝, and tech enthusiast 💻. If you like my work and want to support me, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to my newsletter for as little as $2.50 a month! 📣

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