Surviving the First 24 Hours of Fatherhood

If you've never had a child before then you might be like me a year ago. My wife was pregnant, ready to pop in about two months, and I was doing my best to picture what it would be like to be a father. I had images in my head of family picnics in the park, throwing various sorts of balls around in the backyard (we knew we were having a girl, but we figured she would probably like throwing things as well as a boy would), feeding her, rocking her to sleep, and everything else I had seen on television and occasionally at my sister's house (I have a niece and nephew).

Labor, on the other hand, didn't feature too often in my mind. Why not? Because I was scared to death, that's why not. My wife was reading up on all the birthing books and getting excited about natural labor but meanwhile I was getting ready to be a pretty much helpless bystander during a process that would put my wife through pain and nausea for who knows how many hours. And my job was to be supportive. Forget my wife for a second - I had little doubt she had the stamina to do her job - but would I have the cajones to do mine?

As it turned out, my wife was during labor like she is while facing any big challenge in her life: focused and fiercely independent. It took over 12 hours for our daughter to come and I assure you that despite my readiness to help I had very little to do with the result. Arguably the most difficult part of having a baby for a woman was over.

The hardest part for me was only just beginning.

I had gotten barely three hours of sleep the night before. Whether this was because I had some sort of premonition that my daughter would be born the next morning or because I had had too much coffee the day before, I don't know. Nor did I care that morning labor began. We were going to the hospital to welcome our kiddo to the world. There would be more coffee. I would be fine.

I wasn't. Once all the adrenaline of the birth wore off, I was exhausted. You would think I was fortunate because the birth happened in the evening so we could go straight to sleep. Think again. The hospital wanted to keep us for a couple of days to run some tests and provide breast feeding counseling. All this starts happening right away. There is no magical switch that tells your new baby that it's nighttime, Mommy and Daddy are tired, let's all sleep now. No, she needs to eat all the time and doesn't have a clue how. And the hospital needs to take blood samples, and urine samples, and weigh her, and measure her, and help with the breast feeding, and basically do something that will involve lights and noise every half hour to an hour.

For me the magic of childbirth had temporarily evaporated. I just wanted to kill things.

Mothers - at least after a natural birth - are given the wonderful gift of seemingly unlimited energy with which to tackle the challenge of learning to feed the baby and dealing with nurses. Fathers are not. The one time I did manage to get some real shuteye, falling into a fairly deep sleep for longer than twenty minutes, a machine in the room began to beep. Imagine all the hatred you have ever felt for anyone and anything in your life bubbling to the surface in one acute moment, and you might understand how I felt about this beeping. My impressively patient wife guided my addled mind through the process of killing this little aural demon and I returned to my bed, where I seemed only to blink and it was time for another checkup.

The next day we only asked a few people to come see the baby. Even with these select few - some of our closest friends and family - I hardly knew what to do or to say. It still felt like the middle of the night as far as my body clock was concerned. It strange to have people who weren't nurses in the room. What could their purpose possibly be? To see us? We were a mess. To see the baby? Why? She was going to stick around for a long, long time. In the state I was in, the best I could do was just allow things to happen around me. I certainly wasn't calling any shots.

By midday it already felt like we'd been at the hospital for ages. What day was it? How many days had we been here? Our daughter was only born yesterday? That can't be right. Check the calendar. It was hard to understand that there was a place out there in the world where I had coworkers who were doing the job I would have done that day had life continued on as usual. It was surreal to think of anyone else doing anything other than standing in a hospital room trying to figure out how to change a diaper.

24 hours after the birth of my baby girl I was just beginning to feel like myself again, but a new self. A father self. After getting enough sleep - in a piecemeal way - to make up for what I had lost (about ten hours lost over two nights, by my count), I was beginning to imagine taking this kid home. And that sounded very nice.

So to you soon-to-be first-time fathers out there, I do have a bit of advice. First off, get plenty of sleep every single night leading up to your baby's due date. Store up those beautiful hours of restfulness. You're going to need them.

Second, try not to worry about labor. Instead, visit the hospital and try to visualize what your life is going to be like in those first 24 hours afterward, which will feel like an eternity. Prepare yourself to do battle against an always wakeful hospital atmosphere, and try to secure a private room if you can. We were lucky enough to have one and I can't imagine how much worse the killing instinct would have been had we been burdened with unwelcome company.

Third, bring something to do. Yes, you read that right. Run this past your wife first, of course, but I'm telling you that for your personal sanity you will need to focus on something other than how well your baby is latching on to his or her mother, whether he or she is peeing or pooping enough, whether he or she weighs enough. These are things that are not under your control and there are professionals working on it. There is nothing wrong with a little escape when you feel like you're going to lose your mind if one more problem comes up that you can't solve. And you know how your wife hates it when she wants to talk about her problems and you keep trying to fix it? All her attention is probably going to be on the baby and on the nurses, so she won't feel quite the need to talk things over with you that she usually does and will hate it even more if you go into problem-solving mode. Just take out your laptop, iPhone or a good book and shut up. Your judgment is not to be trusted just now.

Good luck, gentlemen. Remember as you're going through it that there is a huge reward at the end of this. You will be bringing home something that you love more than you've ever loved anything. It's going to change your life, and trust me, you'll know in your heart it is a change for the better.