Fatherhood Diaries, Volume I

I have long marveled at the fact that human beings have managed to keep reproducing ourselves for so long. The whole process just barely works. It is among the most brittle biological phenomena I have ever observed, prone to error and failure at every single step of conception, pregnancy, and birthing. On top of this, human beings have by far the longest maturation period of any species. Where most mammals are independent within minutes, weeks, or months, human babies take—nowadays and in advanced societies—two decades to become self-sufficient.

It has always saddened me that birth rates are in freefall in those same advanced capitalist democracies, but I cannot say it has shocked me. "Why keep going through all this trouble?" is not a question that resonates for me, but I am unsurprised that it has, manifestly, resonated for many of the world's smartest and wealthiest people. And I would be lying if this question has not tempted me at various points earlier in my life.

By the time my wife and I chose to have our first child, I had worked through many intellectual answers to the question of "why bother?". But I had never felt that answer in my bones. But then, a few months prior to the birth of my son, I was on a work trip to London. Alone for a day, I decided to explore London's many great bookstores—shopping, I must admit, entirely with myself in mind.

One of them, Foyles, places its baby and kids' books in a huge lowered area dominating the first floor and any customer's line of sight upon entrance. "Why not check it out?," I wondered. As I walked through the aisles I realized that in this moment, I might well be selecting the very first written words I would read to my son—the first artifacts of mankind's collective journey to understand, interrogate, and document reality. This thought did not occur to me so much as it hit me. I stopped dead in my tracks. For an instant, the weight of this task, and the joy of it, took the air out of my lungs. There is this unfathomably vast inheritance all around us, and it is my job to convey this to a new mind.

This is why we upend our lives for reproduction. This is why mothers put their lives on the line. This is why we bother.

—

The course of a human pregnancy is determined principally by the size of a newborn's skull. Nature crams as much neural development in the womb as it possibly can, and the difficulty of passing a head of newborn-baby size through the birth canal is a leading source of trouble during delivery. Even then, the newborn's brain comes out underdeveloped. Some even say that, for all intents and purposes, a newborn baby is still a fetus for the first several months of its life.

My son was born on December 30, 2025 at 11:11 AM. His was a long and arduous delivery for his mother. As first-borns often do, he came late—nearly two weeks late, in his case. This meant his brain had even more time to develop, and grow even larger, than usual. The night before his birth, my wife's contractions were constant, sharp, and vicious.

We lit our hospital room with warm artificial candles and shut off all fluorescents. I held my wife's hand as the contractions tore through her. I hugged her during her all-too-brief periods of respite. Despite her pain, my wife has never looked so beautiful to me, never seemed so strong, than she did then, in that dim light.

When it came time for delivery I stood beside her hospital bed and held my wife's shoulder. There was very little I could do; I said whatever words I could think to say, gave her occasional sips of water, and held a fan to her head. Very early in the process, I could see glimmers, and then eventually large portions, of what I believed to be our baby's head. Yet for nearly all of the 90 minutes that the crowning endured, I saw not a single facial feature.

Our doula pulled me aside and whispered that what I could see was in fact swelling on top of our baby's head, not the head itself. While our son had come late, you see, his head had been in the correct downward position—facing toward the birth canal—for quite some time. When this happens the brain and the skull naturally grow in a cone-like shape, matching the affordances of the birth canal. This swelling is normal, and after birth it quickly settles into a standard head shape.

But at the moment of delivery, this swelling was bad news: it meant that the hour of crowning my wife had already endured was a mere prelude to the actual head of our son.

Suddenly, the room grew tense. Ancillary members of the medical staff, who had been standing in the corner and chatting, fell silent and serious. In an ominous tone, the doctor asked that the volume on the fetal heart rate monitor be raised.

Pulling me aside again, our doula glanced at the monitor, and then at the doctors, and whispered to me that our son's heart rate has dropped in half, and stayed there, for the last several minutes. I do not remember what she said exactly, but I remember one word: "unsustainable."

I cannot describe what it felt like to hear that word. I could see the top of my son's head, but his heart rate was not sustainable unless something changed fast. It felt like something was being ripped out of my chest. But there was no time for me.

My wife heard none of these whispers. The question of "do we tell the mother this news?" did not even arise. There was something pre-modern, yet eminently appropriate in the moment, about this.

I went back to her, picked the fan back up, and pressed my hand on her shoulder. A dozen people were with me in the room, all with our words of encouragement. Some belted them, others whispered. She worked harder than I have ever seen a person work. After a few minutes of her titanic effort, and that of the entire medical staff, my son emerged into this world, healthy and strong, into his mother's somehow-already-waiting arms, while his father watched and wept.