I came across this meditation on Twitter/X & found it quite profound:
I became a father yesterday.
My wife did this without an epidural. I watched her suffer in ways I will never fully comprehend, carrying a weight I could not share no matter how I tried. For nine months, I was present but powerless.
Pregnancy forced me to confront something modern life constantly tries to erase: you must wait. Painfully. Excruciatingly. There are no shortcuts to life. No hacks. No optimizations. Just time, and flesh, and blood.
Women bear the disproportionate burden of bringing life into the world. I still don’t fully understand why. Only that it’s true, and profound, and humbling beyond words.
I witnessed pain in its rawest form. À suffering that creates. That’s the poetry of it. Imperfect, brutal, but so precisely orchestrated that it cannot be coincidence. I saw Eden play out; the curse and the promise, together in one body.
There is no way you witness how life begins and conclude this is random. No way you watch a body break itself open to bring forth another person and think we are here by accident, that existence is a cosmic joke. The process is too terrible, too sacred, too exactly what it needs to be.
If everyone began life by witnessing a full pregnancy and labour, we would understand the weight of human existence differently. We participate in it, but we do so as children and forget. This is the passage. The one that strips away pretense and forces you to reckon with the fact that we are here for something.
I always assumed fatherhood would arrive in my thirties, after I’d figured myself out as robustly as I imagined I’d want, after life had settled. Instead, it showed up at 27. No warning. No badge of readiness. Just reality.
Two things haunted me throughout these nine months.
The first: What is a father?
For nine months, you wait for someone you do not know. You count weeks, feel kicks, watch your wife’s body transform and suffer, but the person at the center remains a mystery. I kept asking my wife, half-joking: Who the hell is this guy? He could be anyone.
That realization struck me harder than expected: the sheer nothingness of human fatherhood at the start. You don’t author a child. You don’t summon him by will. You are present, but not primary.
And that’s when it became clear.
There is a greater Father.
One who was with him in the womb when I was not.
One who willed him, shaped him, knit him together before I ever felt useful.
One who knew him before he was visible, before he was named, before he was handed to me.
Pregnancy made that impossible to ignore. It stripped me of the illusion of control.
A child is not a possession. He is a gift. And like all real gifts, he comes from Someone higher.
I’ve been able to slowly understand that parenting is not ownership. It’s stewardship. Helping this little man discover his real Father. The One who loved him before the foundations of the world.
And more than that, parenting is trust.
Trusting that the same God who found me in my confusion and chaos will find him too.
Trusting that I don’t have to be the savior to be a good father.
Trusting that my role is presence, love, discipline, humility. Not replacement.
I understand I am not the source. I am a signpost.
And strangely, that is very freeing. Because it means I don’t have to pretend to be God. I just have to be faithful.
So help me God.
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Of course, this being Twitter, I had to skim the replies & came across this (who admittedly makes some good points) - I can relate to her bitterness & cynicism since I selected such a sub-par sire for my offspring:
Tell her congratulations on the safe delivery of her baby. As for weird, I find it extremely weird that you seem so eager to dehumanize her and diminish her gift to you.
Your wife used her female body – the body that men, apparently you included, are so eager to objectify – to do something that no man is capable of doing, and never will be. For centuries, it was the only thing a woman could do that men would appreciate, but that’s neither here or there.
The fact is that your child is a gift - not from God, but from your wife, born from the love she bears you – and you don’t seem to realize that. Male ejaculate is perhaps the most worthless thing on the planet on its own, but women take it and use it to create what most of us would agree is the most precious thing on the planet – a brand new human being.
And to do this, we use the body that men have abused and objectified for as long as we’ve been human beings, and probably longer. The very thing that makes women vulnerable, we use to give men a gift beyond the price of rubies – a human child. It’s sad that so few men seem to care to understand or appreciate that.
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I would have compared the priceless value of one’s own child to “diamonds” or “platinum”, but other than that, Diana is spot on - my ex made me feel so worthless by his rejection & focused cruelty, when I had made this ultimate compromise/sacrifice for him. I will never until the end of my days, I suppose? understand - it’s one thing for men & women to fall out of love, pursue other relationships, etc. What I cannot comprehend is how Michael was determined to injure & destroy both me & his own son in the process? There sits my primal wound, I guess.
My girl Kristy just became a grandma at the ripe old age of 36 (her stepdaughter had her baby Thursday). I hope all goes well for them - Who am I to question why baby daddy didn’t marry Kendal?!? I had been an old married lady for 13 yrs at the ripe old age of 34 when I had my son, & neither marriage nor social stigma shielded me from the fallout of my ex making an absolute ass of himself (I started to type “jackass” but that would be insulting to my beloved donkeys)
Kendal & Kollter
Poppy Justin
