Wrapped up in books

When you're going to be a new parent, one of the things that's hammered into you is that you should read to your child. "It doesn't matter what it is, as long as it's proper English," an older nurse who was substitute teaching our class for parents-to-be weirdly said to a room in which about half of those present didn't have English as their first language, thus becoming an Erin and Jeff inside joke.

I, of course, wholeheartedly support reading to children. In the early months of W's life, we read to her, but it was hard to tell whether she was getting anything out of it. And at that stage, does it really matter whether you're reading or just talking to them in general?

Then, after becoming really mobile, she entered a stage where she just didn't seem to have the patience to let a book be read to her. So we kind of stopped reading to her for the most part, for a while. I wasn't worried. I figured it was a stage. And we could see she was still being read to at daycare (we wondered how she acted there; was she able to sit still for a book, just not for her parents?).

Still, a small part of me felt like maybe I was doing something wrong by hardly ever reading to her during that time. A small part, to be sure. I wasn't really worried. But it nagged at me occasionally.

In the last month or two, we were pleased when we discovered that the phase of W being unable to sit still while we read her a book had ended. We started reading to her more, and she seemed to enjoy it. A great development!

Then, a couple weeks ago, all of the sudden, W became obsessed with books. One day she just started picking up books a lot and handing them to us and saying, "Read. Book. Read. Book."

It's continued every day since and it's just been a joy to experience.

Well, sometimes it gets to be a little much because she just does not want to stop reading books. It will be time to go to daycare, and, "More. More. Book. Book." It will be time to go to bed, and, "More. More. Book. Book." But even this is just so adorable and heartwarming.

I think the most wonderful part is not just seeing her newfound love of books, but also seeing the ways she interacts with the books and how rapidly she retains new information. I find it so fun to just think about all the connections that are forming in her brain. It's often said that a toddler's brain is like a sponge for new information, and it's so true, and it's so cool to witness in person with your own child.

Neuroplasticity, man. It's just amazing.

With most of the books that we read a lot (and there are some books that we've already really read a lot) there are one or two or even a bunch of places in the book where W will say or do something in response to the words and pictures, and she'll consistently do it every time we read the book, and it's so cute and funny and delightful and fascinating all at once.

Here are some of my favorite examples!

An early contender for W's favorite book is Cat's First Baby by Natalie Nelson. W likes to point at the two main characters on various pages of the book and say "cat" and "baby."

She likes to say, "Down!" (something she learned to say when one of our cats is on the table or counter) after we say, "You don't look like a cat from up here" on this page:

 

On this page, she likes to say, "Wa-wa" (water, something she frequently says, although it could mean either that she sees water or that she wants a drink of water; also, spilling glasses of water is something she likes to do herself, but the idea of either a cat or a baby apologizing is pretty funny):

 

And on this page, she likes to exclaim, "Zoooooooom" along with her parents:

 

Another favorite book is Hug by Jez Alborough, a book with minimal text that illustrates the story of a young monkey named Bobo looking for his mother. When she sees Bobo riding an elephant, W says, "Wheeeeeeee!"

This is something she often says when on bike rides with me; perhaps she imagines riding an elephant would be similarly fun.

In The Feelings Book by Todd Parr, on this page, W gets a big smile on her face and starts bobbing her head:

It's so cute!

In Thank You, Tree, illustrated by Fiona Lee, upon seeing this page, Willow points to the pancakes and says, "Mmmmm":

Goodnight Moon was a favorite book for my parents to read to me (an experience shared by many, no doubt). When she sees the "quiet old lady who was whispering hush," W puts a finger in front of her face and goes, "Shh, shh, shh."

And the other day she picked up the book and started saying, "Hush! Hush! Hush!" (not opening the book to that page, just remembering something that was in the book she was holding). I told my parents about this and they loved it.

There are many more examples, but that's a good sampling. I hope that for those reading this who have raised children in the past, this brings back memories of similar experiences. Books are wonderful things, and reading them has done so much to enrich my life. It's so exciting to witness the start of that process in my and Erin's child!

The light comes back on

2024 was a remarkable year. It was remarkable for a lot of reasons, many of them bad. But in regards to my own life, the ways in which it was remarkable for good reasons easily surpassed any previous year I'd lived.

During 2024, there were four different experiences I had that made me feel, truthfully, like I'd ascended to some higher plane of existence or been transported to a magical realm, where I was in touch with the universe and the essence of what it is to be alive in a way that the events of normal day-to-day life don't even approach. This might sound like a description of some crazy psychedelic drug experience (I can't speak to that personally), but it isn't. It's just that I got to do some really, really amazing things. And I've had other such experiences in my life, but never so many in a single year.

One was the honeymoon Erin and I took to Spain in early March, perhaps a topic for another as yet unwritten post. Another was witnessing a total solar eclipse in person. It goes without saying that a third was becoming a father - really not just the birth experience (although that was the most profound) but also many little moments since that I've shared with Erin and W.

The fourth was the most cathartic and emotionally powerful concert that I've attended in my life, which if you know me you know is really saying something. The concert took place on March 22, 2024, at Revolution Hall in Portland, Oregon, and was played by one of my top two (with Okkervil River) favorite bands ever, Typhoon, in celebration of the tenth anniversary of their album White Lighter.

 

The concert not only marked the tenth anniversary of one of my favorite albums, it also, I realized during it, marked a closing of the door on the most tumultuous ten year period of my life.

The short run of White Lighter tenth anniversary shows that Typhoon did in March of 2024 was actually a bit belated, as the album was released in August 2013. So let's jump back in time to August 2013.

Typhoon had come up on my radar earlier that summer, when I saw them listed among upcoming shows at the Beachland Ballroom and Tavern in Cleveland and thought they sounded interesting. I hadn't yet listened to any of their music. I didn't know that the band's lyrics were largely inspired by lead singer Kyle Morton having nearly died from complications stemming from Lyme disease, and were thus about grappling with mortality and the fragility of the human body in both dark and hopeful ways.

White Lighter was released on Tuesday, August 20, 2013. Three days later, on Friday, August 23, my first wife Cara was admitted to the hospital after it was discovered that she had a blood clot in her calf, and it was subsequently discovered that her lungs were full of blood clots. Early the next week, she was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. Needless to say, my whole world was turned upside down.

A couple weeks after the initial hospitalization, I listened to Typhoon for the first time. I had no idea what I was getting into. No idea how relatable the music would be. No idea that the music of Typhoon would become one of the most important things that would help carry me through the next few years of my life, first living with a spouse who had what was almost certainly terminal cancer, and then living as a young widowed person and struggling through physical and mental health problems of my own.

It's funny that the album with which I would form a stronger emotional connection than any other in my life was released within days of the event that would lead to it having that emotional resonance. If I'd listened to White Lighter on its release date, I'd have liked it a lot, but it would likely have just been one of many albums that I liked a lot. A week later, everything had changed.

And because White Lighter is the single most emotionally meaningful album to me, and I already knew very well that anniversary concerts of favorite albums could rank among the best things I'd ever experienced, when I saw that there would be tenth anniversary shows I knew there was no way I could miss out on attending.

I took a long weekend and flew to Portland the day before the concert. My whole visit was great. Non-concert highlights included several really fantastic meals, a visit to Powell's, the world's largest bookstore, and a round of disc golf at Pier Park, a very highly rated course that quickly became my favorite that I've played.

A very exciting birdie!

I also did a huge amount of walking. It's well known that "getting your steps in" is good for one's physical health. It's becoming more well known, but is still underrated, how beneficial long walks can be for mental health and emotional state. Between the honeymoon in Spain and the Portland trip, I'm pretty sure March 2024 is the month in which I've walked the most in my whole life, with several different days of over 20,000 steps each. Is it a coincidence that this happened during what was easily one of the best months of my life?

A lot of the walking I did was in the lush, sprawling expanse of Forest Park, one of the nation's largest urban forest areas. Being able to spend time in nature that's readily accessible from a city is a great thing, something I love about my home of Cleveland Heights, and Forest Park is probably the best such place that I've encountered in my travels.

 

Repping another favorite Portland band, Joseph. 

It's a pretty magical place, but the magic of walking through those lush woods didn't compare to the magic that took place in Revolution Hall on the night of March 22.

This was, in fact, the second time I'd seen Typhoon play a show in Revolution Hall. The second time, in fact, that I'd seen Typhoon play a tenth anniversary show in Revolution Hall - the prior, on November 5, 2017, was for the tenth anniversary of their record label.

Both shows came at very momentous times in my life. Just as my introduction to Typhoon, and first time seeing them live, had also come at a very momentous time in my life. All for very different reasons.

I got to the venue early to make sure I could get a good spot near the stage. There were two openers - the second, the Fourth Wall, I had seen open for Typhoon once before, in 2018, and it was great to see them again. Anyway, between waiting for the show to start and waiting in between acts, I had plenty of time to think about the band I was there to see and how their music had woven itself into those ten years of my life going back to White Lighter's release.

I even took the time to read my previous blog entries about Typhoon. I felt grateful to my past self for having written all those entries. It was a good reminder of why I write. It was a good reminder of what all I had been through to get to the remarkable place I had reached.

One of those entries was called Wait for the light to come back on. I wrote it after that previous Revolution Hall show in 2017. The title comes from the lyrics of "Artificial Light," the opening track of White Lighter and a song that had often moved me to tears when I saw it performed live.

On that November 2017 visit to Portland, I was still reeling and emotionally devastated from what had happened the month before - an out of nowhere (to me) breakup that was the most traumatic thing I had ever experienced.

Which, considering I had previously been widowed at the age of 31, is obviously saying something.

Taking a very long walk around Portland and then seeing an amazing Typhoon concert had provided a major respite from the pain I was experiencing. I think it was really the beginning of my healing process, although that process took a long time.

In 2024, once again, the combination of a long walk around Portland and an amazing Typhoon concert had a profound effect on me.

I realized something as I stood there in the crowded concert hall and thought about all my past experiences with Typhoon and the words I had written. All those concerts and the things that had been going on in my life when they happened. September 2013. March 2014. September 2014. November 2017. January 2018. June 2018. April 2022.

What I realized was that, ever since August 2013 - the release month of the album whose tenth anniversary this show was celebrating - I'd carried with me an inescapable feeling that the life I had was not the life I was supposed to have. There was just something wrong about it.

Turning 30 and then a couple months later learning that your wife has stage IV lung cancer will do that to you, I guess.

But I also realized that there had been one short-lived period of time within those ten years when that feeling had gone away. When it had felt like everything had fallen into place and my life made sense again.

It was an illusory feeling. Now that I have a child of my own, I can see even more clearly how absolutely insane it was that my (also widowed) girlfriend of April through October 2017 had pushed me into a stepfather role for her four-year-old daughter within a month of us meeting in person. But I didn't realize that at the time.

I can see clearly now something that I was aware of at the time but then, I think, didn't want to admit was true after it ended. Those months in the summer of 2017 actually had been the happiest time in my life. (Had been! But that's no longer true.) It didn't seem right when I had been happily married to someone with whom I shared nine years of my life to say that the happiest time in my life was instead a short-lived relationship with someone else, but honestly, it was true, and it was because being a parent (for all intents and purposes, albeit not in a formal or legal sense) was the most magical thing I had ever experienced. And thus, suddenly having that parental role and that relationship with that child stripped away from me was the worst trauma I'd had to endure.

I realized something else. When I thought back on my life, there was a clear line of demarcation, almost as if I had lived two different lives. There was the period of my life that felt immediate and familiar and real. And there was the time before that, a time that almost felt like a past life.

That line of demarcation was August 2013. The month in which White Lighter was released. The month in which everything in my life changed.

When I think back on the events of August 2013, there's an immediacy to them, as if they didn't happen all that long ago, even though it's now been over 12 years. And that's also true of all the important events that have happened between then and now.

But go back a little farther in time, and I find that events of even, say, July 2013 feel like they happened in a different lifetime. It's an uncanny feeling, although it's one that makes sense when you consider what happened.

So this concert celebrating the tenth anniversary of an album by one of my favorite bands was also much more than that.

The first time that I saw Typhoon live, it was amazing to witness the 11 members of the band all cram onto the tiny stage of the Beachland Tavern. I'd never seen anything like it.

I was too close to to fit the whole band in one picture, but you can see how crowded the stage was.

In the years since, various members of the band had had to move on to various other responsibilities in life. The size of the band had shrunken considerably. The most recent time I'd seen them, April 24, 2022 - the day after my second date with Erin, and a significant date for other reasons - a version of the band about half the size of the original had taken the stage at El Club in Detroit.

They'd played a great show, but it couldn't quite compare to what had once been.

On March 22, 2024, the full Typhoon lineup whose music had taken hold of my soul ten years previously once more took the stage at Revolution Hall. I had always thought, when I saw them, that the band seemed like a family. And this was like the best kind of family reunion. It felt like things were once more the way they were supposed to be. It felt euphoric.

And the music hadn't even started.

It's hard to put into words what I felt when the oh so familiar opening notes of "Artificial Light" filled the room, and what I continued to feel for the rest of Typhoon's set that night. But I'll try. As I remember it, a powerful physical sensation washed over my body and I somehow felt both intensely excited and remarkably calm, and at peace, and most of all just blissful.

 

I joined in with much of the rest of the crowd in heartily singing along to many of the words. That sort of communal experience with a concert crowd that is so passionate and so there for the music is a wonderful thing whenever it happens. Here it was extra wonderful, both because of what the music meant to me, and also because the feeling I had of the band being like a family somehow extended to the entire audience. It felt like, in that room for that one night, we were all one big family.

Many of the words that I sang most enthusiastically were words I had quoted in one of those old blog posts: Typhoon lyrics that make me think of Cara, posted a week after my first wife's death, a post that marked my transformation away from being someone who never shared his innermost feelings with, well, just about anyone. The emotions I experienced seeing those songs performed live at this tenth anniversary celebration, singing along, and thinking about everything those words meant to me and everything that had happened over those ten years, well... it was just a transcendent experience in the unique way that live music can transcend normal human experience, but even more transcendent than any other live music experience I've had before or since.

Although so many of those lyrics had meant so much to me going back to 2013 and through the ensuing years, there was one set that now took on a greatly heightened significance. From "Young Fathers":

Now I'm as old as you were when you had me
Should I be afraid? Should I start a family?

In 2015, I explained, "The above is not really so much related to Cara, but sticks out to me because I am in fact now as old (31 years) as my mother was when she had me."

It was a weird feeling at the time, thinking about how at the age my mother was when she became a parent, I instead became widowed.

Kyle Morton, speaking between songs at the anniversary concert, provided additional context to these lines. When he was at the age his parents were when he was born, he thought he was going to die. He wrote those words thinking that he would never get to be a parent himself.

He introduced album closer "Post Script," an absolutely heartbreaking song, by saying that he had written the song for Danielle, his wife; it envisions her life after his death. It had been ten years since that song was released into the world. Ten years since I had listened to it and the rest of the songs on White Lighter over and over while pondering my suddenly uncertain future.

I've talked to both Kyle and Danielle (frontwoman of now defunct band Wild Ones) multiple times at previous shows, by the way, and they're both just absolutely lovely people.

So here we were, ten years later. Kyle had not died. He was very much still alive, and as he explained in what was news to me, he and Danielle had been able to start a family. They had a baby girl!

During the show, it had already been very much on my mind that the crazy journey my life had taken over those ten years had all led up to me meeting Erin and now to Erin, back home in Cleveland, being pregnant with our child. At the revelation that Kyle and Danielle's journey had also led to them having a child - ten years after I had listened to those words, "Should I be afraid? Should I start a family?" and had wondered whether I, too, would ever have that experience - I felt this sense of... I guess I might call it cosmic connection. Sometimes it just feels like everything is as it's meant to be. This was one of those times.

All along, what I had really wanted in life was to meet someone with whom I would like to start a family, and then start a family with that person. Now it was happening. 

After the astonishingly beautiful performance of "Post Script," a song that sticks out in my memories of the first ever Typhoon concert I attended when those 11 musicians crammed themselves onto the tiny Beachland Tavern stage in September 2013, the band left the stage to thunderous applause. They returned to play an encore featuring several songs from their other albums and culminating in a rousing performance of "Reed Rd.," a fan favorite live song that never made it to an album (until it was included as a bonus track on the White Lighter 10th anniversary release) but that I fondly remember closing out the show at my second Typhoon concert. That show had been in March 2014, so almost exactly ten years in the past.

What a ten years it had been.

I walked out of the concert almost in a daze. It had been just so powerful, so beautiful, so overwhelming an experience. It was truly one of the most amazing experiences of my life.

Although since W's birth, the list of experiences similarly or even more amazing has rapidly expanded!

I had spent ten years carrying a vague feeling that my life, in some fundamental way, was not the life I was supposed to have. And now, now I no longer felt that way. I now felt that yes, things are right with my life, this is where my life is supposed to be. I was already starting to feel this (when you've spent so long carrying that feeling of things not being right, it's not easy to shake, even when things do start to really go right), but I think that night in Revolution Hall (importantly, I think, coming on the heels of an amazing honeymoon with Erin in Spain) is when that feeling really solidified itself in my mind.

Because life has been so busy and it's taken me so long to get around to finishing writing this post, I now have the benefit of being able to look back over the two years since that night and see that yes, that's really true. I feel so much gratitude.

Looking back, it seems even more remarkable now. I truly believe that that night in that concert hall induced a permanent and beneficial change in my brain. Not just in the way that the formation of any long term memory permanently alters some neural pathways, but a much more profound and fundamental change in the function of my mind.

Music, man. It really is something.

The day after the show, I did a lot more walking around Portland, including a stop at a record store where Typhoon's music was being played over the speakers. I was not surprised at the affirmative answer when I asked the guy at checkout whether he'd been at the previous night's show. That night, I caught a red-eye flight home with a brief layover in Chicago.

But then my flight from Chicago to Cleveland was cancelled.

While in the airport in Chicago, I joined a video call with Erin and our realtor as they viewed a house. We were still in the midst of a lengthy house search. It would be almost a month later when we finally found our home. We closed on it, incidentally, on the two year anniversary of our first date.

It turned out that the best way for me to get home from Chicago was to take a flight to the Akron-Canton airport, an hour's drive from home. Erin drove there to pick me up (the original plan would have had me taking a train from the Cleveland airport to our side of town). It's always a crazy journey for us!

I was extra happy to see Erin when I walked out the doors of the airport. On the way home, we stopped at a GBH (great blue heron) rookery that Erin had spotted from the highway on a previous drive we'd taken. A love of GBHs has been a significant feature of our relationship from early on. We parked, got out of our car, and looked at all those majestic birds tending to their nests.

I stood there with my wife and thought of the nesting that we would be doing in the near future.

Birth

Earlier this year, I wrote of the transcendent experience of seeing a total solar eclipse in person and stated that "nothing, nothing, can prepare you for what it's like... until you actually do it yourself." I'm very blessed that 2024 has now brought a second experience about which I could say the same thing: witnessing the birth of one's first child. 

On my first date with Erin, sitting across from her at a table at Cloak and Dagger cocktail bar, I did not wait all that long in our conversation before saying, "So, I saw on your [dating app] profile that you do want to have kids." Pretty forward, yes, but why not? When you're dating in your late 30s and looking for a life partner and you have an absolute deal breaker, it's logical to be clear about that from the start.

Oddly enough, it turned out that each of us had just recently broken up with previous partners over the issue of us really wanting to have kids and our exes not being able to commit to the idea!

And now here we were, 27 months later, counting down the days until the birth of our first child. Life comes at you fast.

Erin had expressed hope that our baby would be a "high achieving baby" by being among the roughly 5% who are born on their due dates. This did not end up happening. It was an odd mental space in which we found ourselves in the days leading up to and then following the due date. The most amazing and life-changing event would be happening to us, and we knew it would be happening soon, but we had no idea exactly when it would be happening. One of those days, though, it would just happen - and then bam, life forever altered.

A couple days after the due date, early in the afternoon on a to that point lazy weekend day, I was waking from a nap when Erin walked into the bedroom and said, "I think my water just broke."

Water (or amniotic fluid, to be more precise) breaking, as some people undoubtedly know and others probably don't, doesn't usually happen in the dramatic way it does in movies. And so it was for Erin. It was a slow leak of fluid and she didn't know for sure whether it was her water breaking, she just suspected it was. Usually it's an event that happens in the early stages of labor, but sometimes it happens before the onset of labor. Erin had not yet gone into labor. She had already made plans to hang out with a friend that day, following the theory that if she had plans, she would go into labor in order to throw off those plans. And so she decided, why not go on with the plans?

The three of us went for a nice walk at Shaker Lakes. Erin hoped the physical activity would help bring on labor, but to no avail. The three of us went out for dinner at the Fairmount, a fitting choice as it was where Erin and I had celebrated her positive pregnancy test in November (I somehow didn't think of the significance when I suggested it!). Then Erin and I went home. She figured she'd probably go into labor during the night.

Still, it didn't happen.

And so the next morning, after we'd eaten a pancake breakfast I cooked, we headed to the hospital. Erin had hoped to go into labor when her body and the baby decided it was time, not to be induced. But with PROM (premature rupture of membranes, i.e., early water breaking) there's an increased risk of infection if you wait too long for labor. Still a small risk, but even a small risk is worth avoiding if it's a risk of something really bad.

It was a surreal feeling, driving to the hospital. This was really happening. We were going to the hospital a married couple, Erin and Jeff. We'd be leaving the hospital Erin, Jeff, and a baby, a family of three.

The first few hours at the hospital were uneventful. Erin wanted to give it a little more time to see if she'd go into labor naturally, and was permitted to do this, but still, it didn't happen. Reluctantly, late in the afternoon she agreed to start intravenous Pitocin (a synthetic version of the hormone oxytocin) to induce labor. And then it was on!

Besides not being induced, another even stronger desire Erin had had about her labor was that she would do it unmedicated, not with an epidural. It's often said that contractions induced by Pitocin are especially strong, which could make it difficult to stick to this unmedicated birth plan. At first, though, the contractions didn't seem like that big a deal. Erin described the feeling as being like her period. She began to think, maybe this wouldn't be so bad.

She would later look back on those thoughts and think how naive she'd been.

In the early hours of labor we were basically just hanging out and watching the Olympics on TV. It was around 10 pm that things began to pick up in intensity. It no longer felt to Erin like being on her period. The contractions gradually started to get stronger... and stronger and stronger.

I look back on it with a sense of awe. Things were happening in Erin's body that she'd never felt before and that I, as a man, probably can't even begin to imagine. I don't know what it's like to feel what she was feeling, but it was very clear that very intensely painful sensations were periodically coursing through her. I could only watch and try to offer support as best I could. A birth doula Erin had hired was also present to offer support and (as it turned out) much needed guidance.

One role I had was to provide the soundtrack for Erin's labor. Around 11:30, when things seemed to really be happening, I decided it was time for some tunes so I muted the TV and pulled up the music on my laptop. Erin had previously said that she thought she would like a mix of classic rock plus the Spotify playlist "I Think I'm Hitting a Wall: A Running Playlist by the National" (a selection of running-appropriate songs by one of our favorite indie rock bands, its title a reference to a lyric of theirs). I hadn't put together a playlist in advance so I opened Spotify and put on the National playlist.

That playlist contains 20 songs. Over the course of the 76 minute runtime, labor got more and more intense. Shortly after midnight, Erin remembered that she wanted to log her labor as a Strava activity, and started the recording on her watch. Another reminder of why I love her. She ended up burning a lot of calories in that activity!

I did my best to offer Erin any help I could, following her and the doula's suggestions, as she rode the heightening waves of the contractions. In between contractions, I was putting together a playlist to play when the National playlist ended. Based on the contents of that playlist, it seemed Erin was looking for driving, energetic rock music.

I'll never forget Erin's reaction upon hearing the opening notes of the first song of my hastily assembled playlist, "Black Dog" by Led Zeppelin: a sudden glare in my direction, and the single word "NO!"

Welp, so much for my playlist. Zeppelin was apparently not the vibe Erin now wanted. I remember at this point the doula asking Erin, who was breathing through a painful contraction, what she wanted: music or no music (music), what kind of music (calmer music), lyrics or no lyrics (lyrics), and I scrambled to bring up something that would better fit the mood. I struggled at first but eventually made some selections that worked well, and in fact, both Erin and the doula complimented my soundtrack after all was said and done.

It was about 1 am when Erin violently vetoed my Zeppelin song choice. She was having quite a rough time then, and it got worse for the next hour. On more than one occasion, during contractions, she exclaimed, "I can't do this! I need an epidural!"

She had made it clear beforehand that she did not want an epidural. I would not have judged her at all for deciding to get one, but I also knew that if she made it through without going that route, she would feel very proud of herself afterwards, whereas if she got an epidural, she might end up wishing she hadn't.

There's something about pushing one's body to its absolute physical limits. It's valuable to know how that feels. Erin said something to this effect afterwards, and from witnessing what she went through, I very much believe that she did this during labor. I'll never know what it feels like to give birth, of course, but pushing my body to its limits is something I did many, many times during my distance running career, so I very much appreciate and relate to that sentiment. Thinking about it made me realize that there are probably a lot of people who go their entire lives without knowing the feeling of truly pushing their body to its limits, which I find interesting to ponder.

Anyway, I didn't say anything to Erin about whether she should or should not in fact get an epidural, but was planning, if she continued to say she wanted an epidural, to ask her between contractions whether that was just what she felt in the moment during the height of the contraction, or if it was what she really wanted deep down. There was never a need for this conversation, though, because the doula made a suggestion that changed the whole course of Erin's labor in a way that seemed miraculous: perhaps Erin should try getting in the shower.

The exact way that events unfolded is already hazy, but another moment that stands out, from after Erin started mentioning an epidural but before she got in the shower, was that a new intern MD checked Erin's cervix, and said that he wasn't totally sure, but he thought she was very close to fully dilated. This raised Erin's hopes that the immense pain she was experiencing might not have to continue too much longer. The newbie doctor had to have a resident check his work, though.

The resident reported that Erin was in fact barely more dilated than she'd been when was admitted to the hospital.

This, needless to say, was very discouraging to Erin, who was suffering through pain like nothing she'd ever felt and now seemed to be making little progress for all her struggles!

At this point she was given the option to go with the epidural, but decided instead to try the shower. She did this at about 2 am. I and the doula took turns spraying hot water on Erin's back as she did her best to position her body and use her breathing to get through the contractions.

It took some time, but eventually this really started to work. The contractions were clearly still extraordinarily intense, but now somehow manageable to Erin. She seemed to settle into this state that was simultaneously primal and zen. It's hard to describe, perhaps because I've never seen anything like it. I just know it was amazing and having witnessed it makes me admire my wife even more than I already did.

I also know that I'll never again be able to listen to Bon Iver's 2011 album Bon Iver, Bon Iver without being transported back to that scene of Erin in the shower stall in the dimly lit delivery room. Somehow the vibes of that album, one of a few I picked after abandoning the playlist I made, were perfect for a meditative labor experience in the middle of the night (I also can't imagine the same scene playing out in the light of day; perhaps it could have but in my mind's eye the vibes would be all wrong).

Erin spent about two hours in that shower, a span of time that somehow felt simultaneously shorter and longer. And eventually she began to feel that something was happening. The pushing stage, once it officially began, was incredibly short. Erin was back in bed, her cervix was checked again and she was now fully dilated, an IV was hastily put in her arm (hilariously, Erin very calmly said "Do you like cats?" to the nurse putting in the IV, who was wearing a cat necklace), an urgent call was sent out for the delivery team to get into the room, I took a seat next to Erin and grabbed her hand, a bunch of people rushed in (I was vaguely aware of all the people since my attention was all on Erin), and then the head was emerging and Erin pushed a couple more times and suddenly, our baby was being placed on her chest!

At first, it didn't even seem real. For a moment the baby didn't quite register as a human being in my mind. But rapidly it started to sink in. This was our baby. Our baby was here.

The doula took some pictures during and immediately after the birth. They're really nice pictures for Erin and me to have but not pictures we'd share with a wide audience. One really funny thing about the pictures is the facial expression I'm wearing in quite a few of them. Here's a cropped pic:

 

Based on the pictures, my face was apparently frozen like this for some period of time. I don't know if my face had ever before produced that exact expression. I was almost in shock but simultaneously overjoyed.

We had chosen not to learn the sex in advance. We both had a modest preference for a girl but would have been thrilled with a healthy baby either way. It turned out we did have a girl. This was convenient, since we'd still failed to agree on a boy name!

Time of birth was 4:43 am. Clearly, now the most significant minute of my life. I'd heard it said before that becoming a parent profoundly changes a person like few other things do. And it really does. You've lived your whole life, for me 41 years, and there are so many interests you have, passions you pursue, people whose lives impact yours, and then in this one moment there is this new person who enters the world where before there was only (from my point of view, at least; it's somewhat different for the mother who's carried the baby inside her) a vague concept of a person-to-be, and in that moment this new person becomes the center of your world, surpassing in importance everything that was important before.

Another profound change I've noticed is that I'm thinking about the future much more than I ever previously did. Thinking, with excitement and curiosity and awe, about all the things our child might do in the coming years.

Erin and I instantly fell in love with our daughter (I'll forever cherish the memory of seeing our precious little girl, minutes after birth, open her eyes for the first time), and fell more in love with each other in the process. We've gone on quite a few big adventures together in the relatively short time we've known each other. It's so corny but also so true to say: this will be our biggest adventure yet.