For 40-plus weeks, I sat alone, staring at the bricks. Every time my wife, Carly, had a prenatal appointment for our first child, now a thriving year-and-a-half-old named Mayla, I stayed in the car and watched her waddle into the birth center by herself. It was peak COVID, late 2020 and early 2021, and to minimize risk partners were not allowed in.
This being pandemic America, there were vastly different opinions on whether this was right, but one thing mostly everyone could agree on was that it sucked for both dads and moms. Mayla was our first child and first pregnancy, and I wanted more than anything to hold Carly’s hand as we listened to her heartbeat for the first time—have you never heard the Brett Young song!—and pepper the midwife with well-intentioned but probably annoying questions. I wanted to watch our daughter wiggle and squirm and was that a smile? I wanted to, simply, be there.
Instead I watched, through my windshield, a sad little gray tree transition from winter to spring.
Carly is pregnant again. COVID is now either under control or ignored. Partners, those parking-lot heroes from pandemic pregnancies, are allowed to attend prenatal appointments again. There are, for the first time in over a year, at least a few dads roaming the halls of OB-GYN offices, looking around curiously, wondering if they belong in this brand new world.
And so it was a few weeks ago that I walked into Carly’s OB for the 20-week anatomy scan, the second time I’d ever stepped foot in the building (the first was for an early ultrasound, but it was so short and they didn’t have a chair for me in Carly’s room that the whole thing lasted maybe seven minutes so I don’t count it; this time was for real).
We checked in and waited; we had both taken the morning off from work so we had that excited feeling that we were doing something special (and the evergreen realization that life outside of a school building really does carry on normally). My first impressions were that it looked…like a doctor’s office: not-too-bright fluorescent lighting, friendly but not overly friendly staff, magazines strewn across wooden side tables next to pale vinyl chairs.
About 10 minutes later we were called back by a woman with the name of a U.S. state, who led us into a dim room that had changed so many lives. The overwhelming feature of this ultrasound room was delicate machinery: computers and sleek-looking instruments and lots and lots of screens. Everything was either silver, black, or gray. There was a giant TV hanging from the wall, and the ultrasound tech had Carly lay on the medical chair across from it. I sat in a fabric chair right next to it.
The tech asked us if we wanted to find out the gender; we held strong and said no (how tempting it was, though, to say you’re not going to find out and then crack at the moment when you could). The tech then rubbed a cold jelly all over Carly’s stomach, turned on the TV, and began moving the ultrasound wand across her midsection. I rested my hand on her leg. And then, like magic, our second child appeared on the giant screen in front of us.
Not that we could tell: There was an image on the screen, sure, but it mostly just looked like a series of ever-shifting gray shapes in a sea of black. The tech seemed to move the wand continuously, taking pictures and coding each one with a (to me) unintelligible combination of letters and numbers. She paused perhaps once or twice to explain what we were looking at, but for the most part the room was silent, save for the familiar hum of technology.
And that’s how it was for the next 30-plus minutes. There was moment of excitement when, for the first time, we could make out our baby’s face and position: there he was, or she was, our second kid, up on the screen in front of us, kicking their little legs, squirming and shifting, and I couldn’t help but wonder if they knew we were watching them and they were saying hello, and it seemed, maybe, like we were meeting for the first time.
Or maybe we were dreaming. The room was warm and quiet, Carly was reclining comfortably, and the light was low. I couldn’t believe it, but during the moment I had anticipated for so long, the time I was actually in the room and not FaceTiming in from the parking lot, I actually felt my eyelids getting heavy. Later Carly told me she felt the same way.
And that, perhaps, was the most telling takeaway from the ultrasound: Aside from the moment of genuine wonder and joy when we could clearly see our child, the entire experience felt oddly antiseptic, scientific, devoid of the emotional weight I had preemptively assigned to it in the solitude of my car. I’m not sure what I expected—balloons and streamers and a “Welcome, Dad! Here is a moment that is going to change your life forever!” sign?—but this was not it. I wasn’t disappointed but I was definitely surprised.
Maybe, and I’m guilty of this often, because of my exclusion the first time I had built it up too much and it was never going to live up to those unreachable expectations. Maybe pandemic dads now have an unrealistic and idealistic perception of their partner’s doctor’s appointments. Maybe the grass, especially from the loneliness of the parking lot, is always greener.
Maybe I simply approached the visit in the wrong way and I should focus more on the other thing that struck me from our visit: the marvel of ultrasound technology. I always knew, of course, that these machines and tools existed—we have an ultrasound picture in a frame in our living room—but watching them in action was a wholly different experience and filled me with gratitude for their existence.
Because, when Carly and I left the office that day for a breakfast date at our favorite restaurant, the only thing that mattered was that we had fully seen our healthy baby. And I could, for the first time, walk out of the building holding my wife’s hand, and this time the bricks were behind me.
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