I’m sorry it took me so long to write. Since your arrival six months ago, life has been predictably busy. I started this website to record moments and memories of being a father when your big sister entered our world two-and-a-half years ago, and since then every piece has been about her. But I want you to know that is not a reflection of my love for you.
In fact, it’s the opposite: Mama and I have been working hard to make sure you and Mayla have everything you need, and writing necessarily takes a back seat to those more important obligations. Some days, like yesterday when I had to work late, that means I leave before you wake up and get home after you’re asleep, and Grandma and Mama take care of you. I want you to know that if I could be home with you, I would, that my absence does not indicate a lack of love but rather an abundance of it. Last night you woke up upset a little after midnight; rubbing your tummy as you fell back asleep was more important than anything I did that day.
I used to think, before you were here, that I had a finite capacity of love, doled out in parcels here and there to who and what I valued most—as if love were like time or energy. I worried that when you were born that I wouldn’t feel the same way about you as I do Mayla. I’ve never been happier to be wrong: You taught me that having a second child does not divide a parent’s love; it multiplies it. The past six months, watching you and Mayla grow, have been the richest of my life.
I was feeling down today, overwhelmed by responsibilities. So I watched a video of you on my phone: We were at the fair, waiting as Mama and Mayla ordered mac and cheese. I began tickling your belly and you squealed with glee, that thousand-watt smile staring up at me.
I felt better after that.
Most people, when they meet you, have that same reaction. “She’s just so happy!” they’ll tell us, and we will have no retort. Your happiness is among the purest I’ve witnessed, right up there with Ama’s as she runs around our backyard. You rarely cry, and if you do you are easily soothed. When we get you up in the morning, or from a nap later in the day, your smile is impossibly true, and your laugh, as Mama puts it, is addicting. You are thrilled that you get to experience another day in your new world. I hope you never lose that.
You never stop moving. It started when you were in Mama’s belly, and it’s continued until now. Legs, arms, feet, hands—constantly in motion, forever searching and probing your physical limits. (I joke to anyone who will listen that you are going to be a Division I athlete, and I’m only like 40 percent kidding.) When we lay you on the floor, we are no longer surprised to find you several feet away just seconds later, reaching for the dog bed or putting a ball in your mouth. I hope you never lose that curiosity either.
My favorite time of the week comes on Sunday afternoons, when I get to hold you for your afternoon nap. It’s just me, you, the sound machine, and my book. You lay on my chest, eyes closed and breathing softly, your round cheeks pressed against my shoulder, and there is nowhere I’d rather be, nothing I’d rather be doing, than sitting there with you in the quiet dark.
I love you, Rory. You are the light of my world. I’m sorry it took me so long to write to tell you.
Navigating everyone’s, including my own, expectations of when your child is supposed to arrive
Illustration by Samantha Harrington
And so again we wait. Two years later, to the exact day, my wife, Carly, and I find ourselves in the same position we were in during those late winter days of March 2021: waiting for the arrival of our child, for the moment our world will shift and our lives will change. The result of that first wait, which ended 11 days after the due date, was nothing less than the light of our world, a strong little girl with a perfectly round face named Mayla.
You’d think I’d be better equipped, then, for this time. I am not. If anything, it’s worse. We were convinced that this baby, for whom we do not know the gender, would come early—that’s what they say about your second, right? The path has already been trodden by their older sibling, so they just come whenever they want, and invariably that’s before their due date, right? We’d definitely have a February baby this time, we told ourselves, no way that both babies would remain in Carly’s stomach well past their due date. No, we thought as the calendar turned from January to February, this baby was coming in a couple days, weeks at most. This baby was coming soon!
They were not. Carly thought she might be in labor the morning of Feb. 13, with intense contractions not far apart. The app on her phone told us to get our bags ready to head to the hospital; she started drafting an email to her supervisor, telling her that she’d be out of work earlier than planned.
It is now March 6. That means every day for the past 21 I’ve been wrestling with the notion, the burden, that today could be the day. The expectation, more than anything, has wrecked me. I’ve been more stressed than necessary, and highly irritable. Every decision, from when to give my fifth graders a science test to what time I should run the next day, seems enormous, way more significant than it should be. Scheduling anything has come with the caveat that my wife could go into labor so I might have to miss it. I’m scared to be away from my phone for longer than five minutes. Every day is a swirling cocktail of emotions, of hope and excitement mixed with embarrassment and disappointment that I’m disappointed the baby hasn’t yet arrived. One day last week when I woke up Carly was unsure if I should go to work that day: She had been having consistent, strong contractions and didn’t want me to just have to turn around. I drove to work, convinced that in a few hours I’d be driving in the opposite direction, ready to experience a momentous life change. Nothing happened. Life continued that day as usual, save that I was carrying a nervous excitement-turned-disappointment in everything I did.
The problem, of course, is not with the baby or Carly, no matter what some comments might lead us to believe (“Why hasn’t your wife had this baby yet?” “Why isn’t this baby here yet?”—as if they have autonomy). No, the problem is my, our, society’s expectation of babies arriving when they “should.” We are told, then conditioned to believe, that babies have a due date, and if, like a gallon of milk, they go past that date, they are considered “late.” If they come before it, they’re “early,” and if they are one of the rare few that are born on their due date, they are “on time.” Babies, in this view, are simply packages delivered by Amazon, or a stork.
As soon as the due date comes—I honestly dreaded it this time, because I knew what was going to happen in the following days—people from all areas of your life will pepper you for updates, look at you incredulously when you walk through the doors of your work, ask when the induction will be, greet you with “What are you still doing here?” All of it will be good-natured and well-intentioned, and you will do your best to smile and offer short, simple answers. And you will be grateful, ultimately, that you have a baby coming at all, forever aware that a child, your child, is a miracle. Plus, you understand that in their eyes, the calculus is simple: The baby was supposed to be here already, the baby is not here, what’s up with that? A baby coming a week past their due date doesn’t align with their expectations of how it should have happened (“No baby yet???? They’re so overdue. Wonder if they’ll ever come!”), and so they want to know why, and they will ask you. You will want to go somewhere, anywhere, to escape the burden of waiting. Instead, everywhere you will be bombarded with the same questions that you’ve been wondering about yourself for the past month. Perhaps what people don’t realize when they ask those questions is that, trust us, we’ve been asking, thinking about, the same ones. We do not suddenly remember that our child hasn’t been born yet when someone asks us. It’s occupied every neural bandwidth we possess for several weeks. There is no one that a “late” birth affects more than the parents of the child. We are trying to be patient.
So therein lies the conflict: Society dictates that a baby is late if they’re not here by their due date, but the baby doesn’t know or care about when they’re “supposed” to be here. They don’t care that you want to get one more decent night’s sleep, or finish up the next project at work, or have another lowkey weekend. They don’t care about people’s expectations about their arrival, including their own parents’. They don’t care what’s most convenient for you, or for the people who ask you. They will arrive when biology dictates.
Mayla was born 11 days late. In the past two years—which have been among the best of my life, watching her grow into a beautiful and independent and hilarious little girl—I have thought about that fact exactly zero times. When your child comes does not matter, not really, in the grand scheme of things. So long as they and their mother are healthy and safe, the timing, the due dates and questions and expectations—all of it is irrelevant. The most important truth is the most simple one: We will have a baby in our arms, soon.
And so again we wait. The moment will come when our child enters the world and changes ours forever. And right then we will know that they came right on time.
Let’s start with the surprise: her eyes are wide and blue, the color of the ocean. Mine and my wife’s are thin and dark brown, the color of coffee without cream. They say her eyes can change color up until she’s a year old, and maybe they will. Most of our close family members’ are dark like ours. But until then her eyes, big and blue, will be two unexpected pools of color in our world.
Her eyes don’t open immediately when she wakes up. In fact, it seems like sometimes they’re the last part of her body to know she’s awake. She yawns and stretches and grunts and sometimes even cries all the while her eyes stay closed. Only when she opens them fully do we know that she is ready.
Her eyes are then alerted by her stomach that she’s hungry. Often this happens immediately, seconds after they open, and food has to be made available no matter what her mother is doing. If too much time passes, she will squeeze her eyes tight, like she’s looking for something inside her face, as her mouth opens to scream.
As she eats, her eyes are focused on the task at hand, only taken occasionally by a passerby in the house (her dad) or the weight of sleep. They have no time, no patience, for distractions; eating time is for eating, and everything else will have to wait. Later, often as you are holding her, her eyes will suddenly widen and turn grave, the universal sign for I gotta take a poop. Sure enough, she will let it all out, making no effort to conceal the noise, her eyes serious the whole time.
Once she has eaten, digested, and excreted, her eyes are light, full of life. If you say something she likes—“Are you having fun with Sophie Giraffe?” “Do you love your mama?”—they will squint in delight as her chin falls to her chest and her shoulders rise and her lips curl in a smile. It is a picture of cuteness, of pure glee. If you say something she doesn’t like—“Are you ready for a nap?” “Wanna take a bath?”—they will sink and stare as her lips twist into the cleanest and clearest of frowns. It is a picture of pure disdain.
You will then have to pick her up, which is the time her eyes love the most. From your arms, they search, constantly. They look at lights and other eyes and signs hanging on the wall and ceiling fans. (Oh how they love ceiling fans.) They often look curiously at her parents’ wedding photos behind the couch, scrutinizing them as if to say, Wait, I know those people… For the first couple months of life, they love contrasts, the black-and-white books of shapes you give to her during the ever-important Tummy Time, literally seeing the world in black and white. A month or two later, they will follow you, or your finger, or whatever you’re holding, as you move from one spot to another, an important developmental milestone, you learn, called tracking.
And that’s only inside. Take her outside and her eyes will have, to use the scientific terminology, an absolute field day. (Only after, of course, she theatrically squints and turns her head away from the sun, like a teenage gamer walking outside for the first time in weeks.) Once they are adjusted to the brightness, or shielded by a bucket hat, they get to work. They take in the trees and the mountains and the squirrels and the birds and the rocks and the leaves and the giant empty blue space up above and the green green green all around. Sometimes they dance across her plane of vision, darting from one thing to the next without rest; other times, they stare, endlessly, at some inanimate object, like a chair or a blade of grass. On hikes through the forest, they look straight up, through the canopy of trees, and when you are overcome by curiosity you will do the same and wonder why you don’t do it more often, for the sight is magnificent: streams of blue and light popping through small pockets between the trees. You smile as you realize that your 3-month-old has taught you to look for the beauty in hidden places.
One day her eyes will fill with tears, and it will be sudden and sad. Until then her cries were dry and therefore lacked a certain magnitude; the tears change all of that. They will hop, slowly, down her cheeks when she’s upset and you will think of the lyrics of a song called “The Girl”: When you cry a piece of my heart dies/knowing that I may have been the cause. Often, you will have been the cause: You will have had the audacity to try to get her to take a nap, or put her in the car seat. Her eyes will narrow and blink as you rock her in your arms and she releases full-throated screams, but they will refuse to close until biologically necessary. When they finally do shut, they will look so peaceful you will forget the battle you waged to get her to sleep. From the baby monitor or from the side of her crib, sometimes you will just watch her sleep, and your worries, for those precious minutes, will melt away.
With the exception of her hair, a chaos of dark brown perched wildly atop her head, her eyes, big and blue, are her most defining feature. They search and find and cry and sleep and track and close—and, you will learn, comfort.
One day you will be so worried about keeping her safe during a pandemic that you will be in the bedroom, fighting off tears. From Mom’s arms, her eyes will turn to yours and look at them curiously, as if to wonder, What’s wrong with Dad? They will stare at you for several seconds, paying attention to nothing else around them because they realize that right then you need the full extent of their love. As they continue to stare, you will think of the lyrics to another song, the one that inspired her name—And all I have to do to rise/is look into your eyes—and take her from Mom’s arms. Her eyes, big and blue, will stare up at yours. And they will, not for the last time, help you rise.
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Maybe, in a few years, we will forget all of this. Maybe, when life speeds up and obligations multiply and priorities shift, we, my wife and I, will forget the small things that made this first month of parenthood the greatest, and fastest, of our lives.
Maybe we will forget eating Jimmy John’s subs in bed at the birth center, fulfilling my wife’s nine-month vision for cold cuts after the restrictions of pregnancy eating had finally, gloriously, been lifted. Maybe we will forget the drive home a few hours later, in the dark of night, as I clutched the steering wheel harder than I ever had and Carly, the new mom, sat in the back seat with the newest member of our family, a sleeping seven-hour-old baby girl named Mayla, speaking to her softly. Maybe we will forget first carrying her blanket into the house so the dogs could familiarize themselves with her scent before she, an intruder, entered the space they’d devoted their lives to protecting. Maybe we will forget that first night, a haze of FaceTiming and unpacking and, finally, sleeping.
Maybe I will forget scooping her from her bassinet as she awoke in the middle of that first night, softly placing her on my chest as I read Lord of the Rings on Kindle. Maybe Carly will forget having to wake up every two to three hours, every night, indefinitely, to feed our growing daughter by lamplight. Maybe I will forget the fruitlessness I felt for not being able to feed her myself and occupying the far less important role of Mid-Feeding Diaper Changer to ensure she’s alert for the second half of her 3 a.m. snack. Maybe we will forget the sporadic, hopeful naps the following afternoons—sleeping, as everyone advises, when your newborn sleeps. Maybe we will forget frantically waking up at 2 a.m. to make sure that she was in the bassinet next to us, that we didn’t doze off with her in our arms in bed. Maybe we will forget, once that panic had passed, touching her sinking and rising chest to make sure she was breathing.
Maybe we will forget the countless appointments, checkups, and weigh-ins with different doctors and specialists, each of them offering a version of the most important truth: Both mom and baby are healthy and strong. Maybe we will forget putting Mayla on the porch to soak up some Vitamin D and reduce her moderately high levels of bilirubin. Maybe we will forget what the heck bilirubin is. Maybe we will forget the gratitude we felt for her first-time grandparents and aunts and uncles, who arrived from out of state to take care of the people taking care of the baby. Maybe we will forget the sheer joy they felt once they held their grandchild or niece for the first time, all of their worries melted away almost instantly.
Maybe we will forget the diapers soiled by yellow, seedy poop, a development that would have been concerning had the doctors not told you it was normal. Maybe we will forget our daughter’s propensity for peeing only when we had removed her diaper before putting on a new one, soiling the changing pad liner more times than we’d ever expected. Maybe we will forget the looks of grim determination or grave concern as she felt, or forced, a bowel movement. Maybe we will forget her first blowout, which somehow resulted in poop coming out the front of her diaper, staining, for good, the clean white shirt she’d been wearing.
Maybe we will forget staring at her, for minutes straight, watching her watch the world, her eyes a window into her days-old mind, trying to decipher what she’s thinking and learning and feeling. Maybe we will forget the furrowed brows and pursed lips and open mouths, or the sudden, instinctual punches and kicks. Maybe we will forget the grunts and moans and squeaks and yawns, the new, adorable soundtrack to our lives. Maybe we will forget her round cheeks and thick hair, her chunky legs and searching eyes. Maybe we will forget her sneezes, full-body contractions that seem to surprise her no matter how many times they come (six in a row one night). Maybe I will forget reading to her in the gray chair in the nursery, feeling her warm milky breath on my chest as she slept or stared out of the window, paying little attention to my reading of dozens of words that rhyme with llama.
Maybe we will forget the crying, and the challenges of breastfeeding, and the stress and short fuses caused by lack of sleep. Maybe we will forget failing to adhere to any type of schedule because newborns are fickle and need to eat when they need to eat. Maybe I will forget feeding Carly appetizers on the couch as she feeds Mayla, holding a bowl of salsa steady so she can carefully dip tortilla chips into it, a hilarious food chain. Maybe we will forget our realization that they weren’t lying when they said parenting was hard.
Maybe we will forget all of this. Maybe this first month will be nothing more than a fleeting, blurry memory, a series of half-remembered moments that we will embellish with time. Maybe we will look back on them and feel completely different than we do right now.
Or maybe not. Maybe there are some moments that you will remember forever.
Maybe, one night, your daughter will have trouble feeding and your wife will be understandably frustrated, her clothes wet with excess milk. Maybe, as she is upstairs showering and you are in charge of heating up burritos for dinner, your daughter will start crying. Maybe you will pick her up and put on music; as the lyrics came through the speaker, maybe you will look into her wide blue eyes. Maybe they will stare past yours, over your right shoulder, into the middle distance. Maybe it will seem like she is watching her entire future unfold, right there in the kitchen, and she lay in your arms, a curious, half-smiling expression painting her face. And, maybe, in that moment, it will just be the two of you, and nothing else will matter, and it will feel like time slows as your eyes become warm and wet and she continues to stare past you, and then she will look at you, and right then you will feel something you’d never experienced in your life, a surge of pure love, and you will know then that she is the most important thing to ever happen to you.
No, you will not forget that.
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Somehow, they sold you short. For months, years if you’re around the right people often enough, they told you this would be “the greatest day of your life” and “there’s no other feeling like it in the world” and “cherish every second because it’s over like that.” They tried, with the vocabulary available to them, to describe something that was beyond words, beyond communication, beyond, even, comprehension.
They did not tell you, in the moment your daughter, Mayla Ruth, entered the world, as you watched the midwife unwrap the umbilical cord from her gray neck and she took her first gulp of oxygen, that your own chest would fill with a light you’d never felt before as around you time slowed and surroundings blurred. They did not tell you, as she was placed, softly and immediately, on your wife’s chest, that your head would, instinctively, fall there as well, the first moments of your new family captured not in a picture but solely in your memory, where they will live forever. They did not tell you, as your wife exclaimed, “I did it!” through relieved, joyous, clipped breaths, that you would be crying more than your newborn daughter, the tears falling under your cloth mask. They did not tell you, when they described her, that words like “beautiful” and “gorgeous” and “precious” were somehow not powerful enough; angelic, maybe even divine, would come closer. They did not, could not, tell you any of this, and perhaps that was for the best, because this was, after all, something, like watching the Northern Lights or viewing the Earth from space, that could only be felt.
The intensity of those feelings, of that love, for your daughter were matched only by the same ones for your wife, and the gratitude you felt for the people who delivered your baby: the nurses and midwives at the women-run birth center who guided you through the most intense, and greatest, day of your lives. All of them reminded you, on International Women’s Day no less, of the irrepressible, imperishable power of women.
You learn a truth soon after you find out you are going to be a father: A pregnant woman is a superhero. She carries, for nine months or more, a human inside of her, one that causes her indigestion and nausea and no small amount of pain. For the first few months, she can eat only watermelon and popsicles (maybe, too, a watermelon-flavored popsicle) lest she throw up, her body rejecting foods like it never has before. If she’s lucky enough to keep down the food, it might stay in there for far longer than is normal, or healthy: The only trips she makes to the bathroom are to empty her bladder, again and again and again, like an old man in a Flomax commercial, interrupting sleep, which she wants, and needs, desperately.
The next three months, the second trimester, are supposedly the easiest, because all she has to deal with then is the small fact that a living being is growing inside of her, constantly, expanding her stomach like a slowly inflating balloon. Perhaps, too, she’ll have some “practice” contractions, and her fingers and ankles and feet will swell, rendering quotidian tasks like taking off a wedding band or putting on shoes a true challenge.
Then it gets real. Her belly, by the third trimester, is at the point where strangers ask, “When’s your due date?” Maybe she’ll describe it to you as carrying, in her stomach, a basketball, only the type that constantly kicks and moves and squirms inside of her. On walks around the neighborhood, the basketball will press down on her bladder, requiring her to find, immediately, a bathroom, or simply make her extremely uncomfortable. Preparations for the big day will be made: bags packed, nurseries decorated, floors cleaned and vacuumed over and over. She will waddle around the house, attempting to make everything perfect for her baby’s imminent arrival, a practice, your how-to-be-a-dad books tell you, called “nesting.”
If, for some reason, she is pregnant during a pandemic, she will go through all of this relatively alone, staying home for Christmas, celebrating baby showers on Zoom, talking to her doctors and watching ultrasounds by herself as you are forced to sit in the parking lot. She will not see family, or friends, for weeks, and by the end of it, months. She will ask you, on a random Wednesday, to take her on a ride to see the mountains under the sun and the cloudless sky, to breathe fresh air away from the house. She will cry, sometimes, but she will carry on with a quiet strength that you can only admire.
After all of this, she will describe it as a “pretty easy pregnancy.”
Maybe her preparation, weeks and months in advance, will be worth it soon, and she’ll have her baby on the due date, or perhaps even earlier. Or maybe she will have to wait a bit longer: a few days, or a week, or two. This time, you will learn, moves excruciatingly slow. In these cases—in the midst of countless doctor’s appointments to check the baby’s health and hers, of trips to the chiropractor to maneuver the baby into a better position, of uncomfortable exams and no-stress tests—she will experience a strange cocktail of emotions, a mix of disappointment that the baby is not yet here and disappointment with herself for feeling disappointed, and growing anxiety about labor, and anticipation, and true excitement that it could happen at any moment.
And then, one day, it will.
Or, more accurately, for biological reasons that she will have already explained to you, one night. Maybe the contractions will start around 11 p.m., just as she was ready to lay her head on her pillow to get some necessary sleep; she will attempt to sleep through them at the start, but she will soon learn that that is impossible, like trying to take a walk during a tornado. Instead she will open up her app to time contractions on her phone, and press the green button when they start and red button when they end. At the start, she’ll be able to talk through them, and as you are shuttling in and out of the garage to load up the car you will find her standing in the kitchen, wondering where to place a new sticker on her water bottle. You will smile.
The time between the contractions will get smaller, and their intensity will increase, until she calls the midwife, who will suggest taking a bath to see if they calm. They will not, and after the bath she will lay down, and suddenly she will jump up, sprint to the bathroom, flip open the toilet, and discard her dinner. The contractions, you will learn, have become so intense that in certain positions they make her throw up. “Maybe we should call her back,” she will suggest, and in less than an hour you will be on your way to the birth center as she huffs, from a small sheet of toilet paper, peppermint oil to manage the nausea.
By the time you arrive she will have been in labor for six hours, and the pain will only increase. For the next six hours, you will watch, hopelessly, as she struggles through active labor, her stomach contracting every couple minutes and rendering her speechless. She will sit on a giant exercise ball, her head bent over a pile of towels, and actually, for a few priceless minutes, doze off between contractions; she will try lying down, and again she will throw up from the pain; she will labor in a giant inflatable tub filled with water.
Throughout it all, the midwives and nurses will shuttle in and out of your room, checking on her and measuring the baby’s heartbeat. They will encourage her, suggest different positions to relieve the pain, and patiently answer your questions: “Does that mean it’s OK?” “All good?” “Are we still moving forward?” They will tell you what to do; you will gratefully listen.
You will change the music and massage her shoulders and tell her you love her, but mostly you will sit, in awe, of the strength she shows in the toughest hours of her life and the unassuming grace and professionalism of the other women helping her through them. She will not be able to speak to you, and this is perhaps the toughest part, because up to that point any major challenge you encountered together you discussed together. You will feel, more than any other time in your life, truly, utterly useless, as you watch the person you love most go through something close to an out-of-body experience as you sit next to her, painfully aware of your physical limitations and the injustice of biology.
She will not, contrary to what you remembered from your birth courses, experience any breaks, any letups from contractions. She will say, accurately, in one of her few full sentences in hours, “I feel like this is constant.” Despite this, she will not take any medicine to manage the pain, her mind set on the natural birth she’d planned for months.
And then, suddenly, miraculously, she will be 10 centimeters dilated and her water will break. You remember from your birth course that she has gone through the worst part, the dreaded “transition,” and from here it’s an hour, maybe two, of pushing the baby out. You feel, finally, that there is light at the end of the tunnel, and for the baby that is literal. Your heart starts to beat faster; you know she is close.
Three hours later, she will still be pushing. The worst part, it turned out, was far from over. At this point she will be exhausted, physically of course—over 15 hours without food, 27-plus without sleep—but also emotionally, with little left to give; she will feel nothing but pain; she will forget the reason for all of this. She will not have said a full sentence, or opened her eyes, for nearly 240 minutes. No position—sitting, laying, squatting—will ease her pain. She will, hands on her knees, barely able to hold up her head, tell you, “I’m scared.” At this point you will wonder, as you look out of a crack through the window at a plane leaving a white wake in the light-blue sky, “Is anything worth this?”
The answer will come less than 15 minutes later.
You will later reflect on the experience and conclude that it was the most impressive thing you have ever, and will ever, watched another human being do: 16 hours of unmedicated labor off of zero sleep and fueled only by fruit juice. You will know then, more than ever before, that your wife is the strongest person you know. You will force back an incredulous smile when she describes the labor as “pretty smooth”; you will know, too, that she is right: Every day, women endure labors with greater challenges and complications than hers, and you will feel even more grateful that she and your daughter are healthy and strong. You will be reminded that women are capable of what you thought was impossible.
They are capable of pushing out, through primal screams, a seven-pound human from inside of them. They are capable of forgetting all of the pain—the nine months of sacrifices and hours of searing contractions—almost instantly as they hold their baby in their arms. They are capable of calmly guiding other women through the most intense experience of their lives, and of soothing the nerves, assuaging the fears, of their partners. They are capable of the extraordinary.
And that, perhaps, is the most important lesson you will ever teach your daughter.
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