Becoming Somebody

I apologize for my lack of blogging lately, but I’ve been dealing with something personal that I am just now prepared to make public. I am going to be a father. To another human. That I created, at least in part, quite accidentally but I suspect perfectly. Or so we’ve been told by the doctors.

The weight of those words — I am going to be a father — even now as I type and read them, and go over them again and again in my head, is staggering. To say Nicole and I are happy would do absolutely no justice to the totality of emotion we are now feeling. The only way I’ve been able to describe it to anyone who has yet to experience it for themselves has been to say it feels like running around barefoot in a thunderstorm. It’s kind of terrifying, the raw power of it all surrounding you. But there is also this ethereal joy that comes along with the terror and makes it impossible to stop even though you know it’s probably wiser to go inside and take cover.

That’s the best I can do right now, and if it doesn’t make sense I guess that’s because it’s not supposed to. For a long time I’ve had an odd relationship with words, depending on them to express whatever is floating around inside me yet understanding all along that they are, at best, an incomplete description of what is really going on, not reality themselves but a metaphor for reality. It’s times like these I wish we just communicated with each other through thoughts and ideas. You’d get a much better picture of what I’ve been trying to say.

And speaking of better pictures, this is what an eight-week-old fetus looks like. Developing baby? Kidney bean? You be the judge.