On June 18, 2020, our world changed forever. As I was adding chunks of frozen mango to a blender to make a smoothie, my wife, Carly, came downstairs, holding a little white-and-blue device that looked like a thermometer. She was smiling warily, walking cautiously, as if one wrong step might propel her from a dream she didn’t believe she was having but didn’t want to end. As she approached she held up the thin piece of plastic for me to read:
“Pregnant.”
The rush of emotions was contradictory and revelatory: a cocktail of relief and surprise, excitement and fear, unbridled glee and concealed disbelief. That day had started like any other of my first 27-plus years of life, with the comfort of knowing that my primary responsibility was taking care of myself; the next morning when I looked in the mirror, the same face that 24 hours earlier had looked so young stared back at me in awe, making plain a newly indisputable truth: I was going to be a father.
To be clear, this baby was relatively planned, if a bit early. Carly and I were going to start trying later in the year, so any feelings of shock were tempered by the fact that it happened only a couple of months earlier than the best-case scenario. (When we broke the news to my parents later in the summer, my dad—whose immediate reaction was to yell, “Oh shit!”—asked if it was planned. “A happy surprise,” I told him.)
But still: I thought I had more time! I wasn’t ready to be a dad, a sentiment echoed by Chris Rock’s character in the movie What to Expect When You’re Expecting, which we watched the night we found out: “There’s no such thing as ready. You just jump on a moving train and you try not to die.” We had just outlined a pre-babymoon plan, featuring lots of time eating sushi and riding rollercoasters. We were going to prepare financially. We were going to take a beach trip. We were going to, and this is straight from the list, find Carly a dentist, get established with primary care doctors, take a road trip to Vermont with the dogs, organize the house, and, my favorite, “read books.” We were going to enjoy the last few months of our family of two. (In the back of our minds we both knew that many of the items on the list would be unattainable because of the pandemic that was ripping through the country.)
Of course, babies don’t come immediately, but there was now a firm deadline by which we had to accomplish all of the things we wanted to accomplish by the time we became parents. We didn’t, of course, both because of the scale of our mission and because aside from the agonizingly slow last few weeks, the time flew by.
On March 8, 2021, at 2:46 p.m., I became a father. I still don’t think I recognize the full magnitude of what it means; I don’t know if I ever will. But I’m hoping this site can help.
I used to write for a living, mostly about sports, interning at The New York Times and Boston Globe before moving out west to work at another paper after college. When I realized I wasn’t suited for the isolation of sportswriting, I did what so many other rudderless millennials do: I changed careers. In a couple of weeks I’ll enter my fifth year of teaching fifth grade in public schools, a job that is equal parts exhausting and rewarding, not unlike, I’m learning, being a parent.
I bore you with this brief biography to help myself understand my connection between writing and fatherhood. Soon after our daughter was born, I realized that every day, everything, seemed so big, so important, so significant that I needed a place to ask and answer my questions, to contextualize our challenges, to help demonstrate a love that I’d never felt before.
I hope Essays of Dad can be, or become, that place. I hope it will be a space for thoughtful writing about fatherhood, a collection of stories and essays and observations that together paint a true picture of parenting, with its contradictions and messiness and uncontainable joys. Judging from cursory Google searches, there doesn’t seem to be a site like it, which both surprised and encouraged me. I hope Essays of Dad will remain unique.
Thank you for being here. I hope to publish an essay—accompanied by an illustration from my incredibly talented friend Sam—every week, and send out a weekly newsletter with background on essays, stories about parenting a toddler, book recommendations, and more (you can subscribe below).
Thank you, again, for reading.
Robbie Harms
August 2021
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