My wife, Lisa, wanted to have kids pretty soon after we were married but I held off. First I was concerned financially because I was a full time student and we were living off Lisa's salary and we were barely making it. We took a financial course called Financial Peace University and got our stuff together and it worked wonders for us. After I graduated we renewed the discussion about kids, but again I held off because I wasn't working in my field, I didn't feel like I had my life yet, and not being in my chosen career path in a way kept me from feeling like enough of an adult to have kids. This period is when Lisa and I had bar none the worst fights of our normally very serene marriage.
After a year in my first full time job I was feeling more settled and finally agreed with Lisa that we were ready to have kids. I'm not sure that I really knew what that meant at the time. I'm afraid that I meant "I can't find any reasonable objections" rather than "I really want to have a child". However nature took care of that.
When we had our first positive pregnancy test I was excited and nervously awaiting confirmation from our doctor. While Lisa was pregnant I had moments of doubt and worry about if we would be able to take care of a child but these were the exception rather than the rule.
When Lisa was about a month pregnant we went on vacation with my parents and we had some indications of a possible problem with the pregnancy and went to the ER twice. That week was one of the most emotional and scary times in my life. It turns out that everything was normal and just fine, but I can still feel some of the terror when I remember it.
Over nine months I fell more and more in love with Callum Cameron (or Anastasia Elizabeth, we didn't know the sex of the baby until he was born). I saw him on the ultrasound when he was just a little 4 week old dot and that was so exciting. At his first ultrasound I saw the top of his head and his hands flailing around above it, and I began to think about what my baby's personality would be like. At his next ultrasound we got a video tour of everything that they have to check. We saw his face, his arms and legs, his spine, and the umbilical cord (we had to look away when the ultrasound tech told us to in order to keep the whole boy/girl thing a surprise, that was really hard). All of these things were awesome and my cheeks hurt from smiling.
Then came the Big Wait. We had this arbitrary due date on which we were quite certain he wouldn't arrive, but having that due date did heighten our excitement a lot. As it got closer and closer we began to ask "will he come early" and hope. I felt like the minutes before friends come over. When I am having a get together I get the house ready, get the food and activities ready, then in the minutes before the guests are supposed to arrive I don't do anything but wait and I usually can't even sit down.
We waited and we waited while the due date flew past, one day, two days, three days. Finally five days after the due Lisa had signs of labor. We walked around to make sure it didn't stop, and Lisa spent the whole time standing because her contractions would get less frequent when she laid down. The midwives told us to rest, we would need the energy, but we were both worried that somehow it would stop and we would have to wait longer.
But it didn't stop, so next came hours and hours of hard work. It was even hard work for me, which since I wasn't having a baby, you can imagine how exhausted Lisa must have been afterwards. But then there was this baby: this little beautiful baby with my hair and Lisa's eyes. This scrawny shrieking spindly lump of humanity with a pinched and wrinkled face like an old man's. And I loved him. It is like all the years of a relationship, meeting, getting to like one another, getting to know one another, falling in love, growing in love, it's as if all of them were compressed into just a few short moments.
I wasn't certain that I wanted to be a dad or that I would be a good dad, but now even though it was only 5 months ago and even though things are hard some times, I just can't look back and imagine not being a dad.
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