It’s surprising how unsurprising it is. You tick off tropes you’ve somehow learned by heart one by one. The morning sickness. The pregnancy test. The cravings. You recognize it, but only as a voyeur.

You’ve seen the joke before and can hear the laugh track except now you’re here, part of an impossibly long cultural and biological chain of humanity and yet the physical reality of it all is happening to someone else.

You observe (probably), support (hopefully), and react (definitely) and you notice daily that every page of this unfolding story has little to do with you.

There’s an adjustment period before you realize that whatever experience you enjoyed before, you are now clearly no longer the protagonist. This adjustment hits harder if you’ve never noticed the subtle and not so subtle ways society defers to you. The unfolding moment of pregnancy feels weird and decentering because it literally is. Mama is pregnant, not you, and her needs dictate the schedules, trajectory, and every important decision you’re making for the next 9 months.

You are used to being able to do something. You can fix it. You can lift it. You can solve it. You can improve the situation or manage the outcome or at the very least avoid the worst of it by being proactive. If you can do something you are useful and if you are useful you have value and control.

The journey through pregnancy can break dad’s model of self.

You can’t fix mom’s nausea. You can’t carry baby. You truly can’t shoulder the physical burden for her in any meaningful or significant way.

You can drive to the store, get the food she’s craving, move stuff around the house (if she’s not trying to do it herself in month 8 when you aren’t looking), and you can sit with her as she’s puking. But when she’s getting assaulted by her body day after day, it’s just as likely she wants you to give her some goddamn space when she’s feeling like dogwater.

Preparing for baby as a dad feels like every day you’re punching at air.

It’s a creeping unease that squeezes harder as the pregnancy drags on. The more competent you are and the closer the big day comes, the more awareness you have of how little you’re doing relatively speaking.

So you compensate.

You turn towards the parts of your life where you feel like you can win.

Work. A project. Something in the yard. Anywhere you can identify a problem and visibly improve it. It’s the only place where your feedback loops of self worth still work.

This self-soothing is your body’s panic response to your identity shifting in real time.

Every ultrasound, heartbeat, and baby kick makes the impending outcome more real and still all you can do is support.

You know you’re supposed to be doing something.

But you have no idea what.

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You, of course, have to start small with baby.

Baby is small. They can hardly move. They don’t understand. They can’t tell you what they need. In a lot of important ways, babies are straight up unable to do anything.

So, as a parent, you do everything for them. Feed, clean, soothe, love, care, hold. All the jobs to be done.

But soon you realize there’s a limit to how much you can do for them. Two limits really.

The first is your own limits on how much you can physically give. You need food, sleep, and care too (though you pretend you don’t for as long as possible). This is the upteenth memetic metajoke you see in any scene about exhausted new parents.

The second limit is less explored, especially for young children.

Your child needs you, but the amount of you they can receive has a ceiling. You can only feed so much, you can only comfort so much, you can only control so much. Baby always gets the final vote on how much they need you at any given moment.

Parenthood’s brutal math is perhaps most surprising in that it also applies to you.

The instinct to give everything you possibly can is painfully restrained by the stark realities of how a human baby grows.

Fortunately, the ceiling of this care does change over time. It expands. It gains shape and texture and color, like a vision of rich, rolling prairie grass slowly pulling into focus in the sunrise. It’s beautiful at first glimpse, but becomes even more so with every added detail gifted by the next ounce of light.

The simple care you give at first, eventually, grows. It grows because it now has space to grow.

Your gentle feeding turns into feeding and locking eyes. Soon this turns into feeding and locking eyes and smiling together. Eventually it’s all of that, plus joyful babbling back and forth. Over time, baby develops the capacity to receive your care in new, deeper and more nuanced ways.

But every new way to care, again, starts small.

Long before a child arrives, our identity is rooted in many things. Your own witch’s brew of self will vary, but it’s likely some combination of your work, personal relationships, hobbies, media consumed, and interests. Or at least it was.

In much the same way as your baby suddenly lost its nice, calm, warm, and cozy home in the womb, you too have lost your inner home. It turns out that a lot of the things that made you you are no longer accessible after you become a parent (for at least a little while).

Some of this is the nuts and bolts of infant care.

Baby cries, you can’t sleep.

Baby cries, you put down your guitar.

Baby cries, you’ll finish that email later.

Baby cries, you close your book.

Baby cries, you can’t finish your dinner.

Even as I type this paragraph, I’ve already soothed my son back to sleep twice.

More than any single substituted activity, it’s really the focus-disrupting, always-on that reshapes your relationship with yourself bit by bit.

If you didn’t have a relationship with yourself before baby, the sheer volume of quiet care you’re giving more or less forces you to address that particular cognitobomb. You spend too many midnight hours alone in your own head to avoid the confrontation.

But if you had a relationship with yourself already, the grief creeps in. Sometimes regret too, but I’d describe it as the sensation of watching a loved one transit the final stages of terminal illness.

You saw your death coming from a mile away. You prepared as best you could. But your preparation can’t change the unblinking fact that you live the finger snap of self death over and over and over again.

Knowing isn’t the same as feeling, which isn’t the same as processing, which isn’t the same as accepting.

And accepting isn’t the same as rebecoming yourself.

The brutal math tabulates, but the figures hint at the next step.

It starts small.

It’s just a fraction of the thing you used to reach for instinctively.

Some scales instead of a song. A bite-sized task instead of a weekend project. A page instead of a chapter.

Til you get the next ounce of light.

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In truth, I didn't not want to be a dad either.

The possibility of fatherhood never really crossed my mind growing up and, frankly, before my then-girlfriend-now-wife asked me about it one sticky Florida afternoon in a Holiday Inn parking lot eleven years ago, I suspect I’d only thought about the question for perhaps a cumulative fifteen minutes.

My gut reaction was “nah”.

This did not go over as well as I expected.

Of course, I had no particular reason to say “nah” other than, at first cut, being a parent seemed like a lot of work.

I was twenty-three, in the Army, and deeply attached to the idea that my limited free time should involve less effort than my day job.

But based on the immediately tearful reaction, the question was clearly a very important one for her (rightly so!). She’d thought about it at length, definitely wanted kids, and my thoughtlessly forceful “nah” caught her completely off guard.

I paused.

Even back then, I was aware that my confident bluntness sometimes had a tendency to blow things up I did not intend to blow up.

Reflecting on my options while I sweated profusely into the cloth seat of my Nissan Versa, I decided I very much did not want to lose the one thing working out for me in my life at the time (the Army was not going that well). So I quickly backpedaled.

My “nah” became a “I need to think about it more because I’ve never really considered that possibility as a potential branch of my life”

I didn’t have the language for it then, but today I might say I confronted a nuanced truth about myself.

And thus began my dadicalization.

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