you never forget your first time

Over the past nine months I’ve described my thoughts and feelings about my wife’s pregnancy. At times it was a bit of a stretch. While trying to be as active as possible, at the end of the day my primary task was one of waiting for the day that eventually came on the second of November. In the week that has passed more has happened than in the entirety of the previous nine months. Every hour there has been something noteworthy that would easily eclipse even the most engaging of posts from February through October. The irony of the situation (and I’m finding fatherhood to be full of ironies) is that now that there is so much to talk about there is so little time to actually write about it.

Now that a rather busy week has gone by I am going to actively try and catch up and write about this rather memorable past week. Again, I’m doing this as much for myself as for anything else as I do not want to forget what it was like to experience this time. When asked to provide generalities about “what it was like”, my wife and I have struggled to find an appropriate analogy to describe the birth of our daughter. For me, the most accurate analogy is by no means appropriate. Having a child has been like loosing my virginity – I wondered about it for a really long time and when it finally happened I looked back on it and thought, “Hmm, that was different.” It’s not that it was better or worse necessarily, only different from what I had expected. And while both events occupy a hollowed place in my memory, the details of both blur with shocking rapidity. Perhaps it is because I want to remember each perfectly, or perhaps it is because I access and rewrite them too often. Either way, by writing down the details of the latter I can preserve a relatively fresh snapshot of what was.