The first couple came to meet our daughter on a Sunday afternoon, early and damp. They had brought an umbrella and lost to the rain anyway. She came in first with flowers and a Tupperware of something still steaming under its lid. He followed with a stuffed animal whose eyes were so large and pleading it looked like the character in an animated film who dies in the first act so the plot can start.
We did the choreography. Coats on the chair, compliments traded like business cards. “You look amazing,” she said to my partner, which was kind, if not strictly true. My partner was at that point a construction site, held together with mesh and resolve. Our daughter lay in the middle of the couch in footed pajamas, blinking up at the overhead light with the grave attention of the very new.
“Do you want to hold her?” the wife asked her husband, maybe three minutes in.
He smiled at the baby, then at us, then looked down at his hands as though they had just arrived in his lap from somewhere else. “Yeah,” he said. “In a minute.”
“Come on. You have to start sometime.” Breezy, but there was a brick sewn into the pillow.
He laughed. “I just don’t want to, like, drop her.” He drew the last word out to make it a joke. The joke sat there on the coffee table where he’d set it down, and we all did the small polite laugh you do.
Our daughter, sensing ceremony, made a noise halfway between a hiccup and a dial-up modem. Everyone leaned in. Nobody moved. My own arms twitched, the way they do when someone reaches for a very full glass near the edge of a table.
Eventually he reached out. Watching him, I remembered my own first week, when I held her like contraband and waited for someone official to arrive and cite me for Illegal Neck Angle. His hands did the arithmetic mine had done. Then his shoulders climbed toward his ears, that doomed attempt to stabilize a situation by tensing every muscle you own. She flopped an arm against his wrist and he made a face that was half wince, half grin.
“That’s good,” she told him. “See? You’re doing it.”
If it had happened once I’d have forgotten it. But they kept coming. Different couples, same afternoon. One pair brought a Tupperware of soup the size of a helmet. Another brought expensive coffee and a plant that later died under our care. Always there was a version of the moment.
“Do you want to hold her?”
“Yeah, I will. In a bit.”
“You can now.”
“I’ll wait till she’s, like, less upset.”
“Just take her.”
And then a small tribunal on the couch, in front of our houseplants and their own future. She prosecuting, he hedging, my partner and me on a jury we hadn’t volunteered for.
What I started to notice, after a few repetitions, was how rehearsed their lines were and how little either of them was hiding. The women seemed to be using our living room as a rehearsal space. If he can’t hold this one, how will he hold ours? The men seemed to be sitting an exam that had been scheduled several years earlier than they’d been told. That, anyway, was my theory, and I liked it enough to keep testing it on people who had not asked to be tested.
There’s a word I keep wanting to use here, which is probably a sign I shouldn’t. Hayra: in Arabic and Persian and Urdu it sits next to the words for wonder, confusion as a kind of awe. I want it because “scared” isn’t quite right, and because a foreign word makes a better sentence than the true and boring one, which is that they looked lost and also astonished, and couldn’t decide which face to make about it. They were frightened of dropping her. Underneath that they seemed quietly amazed that this warm, breathing person existed at all and was, absurdly, trusting them.
Their wives were not lost in any forest. They were somewhere else entirely, out in the spreadsheeted tundra of ovulation apps and prenatal vitamins, of if we got pregnant in March that’s a December baby, which is bad for school cutoffs but good for taxes. They were living several months ahead of the room.
If you’ve done a long flight with someone you love, you know what it is to be in different time zones in the same row. One of you is starving, the other nauseous. One wants to sleep and the other is scrolling the movie menu. Same metal tube, same destination, different clocks.
Pregnancy made that permanent. Before my partner had even seen two lines on the stick, her body had recalibrated: food tasted different, rooms acquired hazards, time moved at a new speed. My body went on being my body. I could eat what I wanted and stay awake in the afternoons and pretend, for hours at a stretch, that nothing irreversible was underway.
So when a man on my couch says he’ll hold her later, some of what I hear is fear and some of it is lag. He’s still on West Coast time in a nursery that’s already had its morning.
Other things are going on, obviously. She’ll be judged for not wanting children; he’ll be teased for wanting them too much. Somewhere behind each of them is his own father — the roughhousing, or the absence, or the hug that landed at the wrong angle — and some half-made vow about it he’s never said out loud.
But mostly what I see is the expression that crosses a man’s face when his wife says, sharply, just hold her. It’s the fear of being seen in a moment of total incompetence by the one person whose opinion has any weight. They’re used to being evaluated on wit, on earning power, on what they listen to. Now the test is whether they can keep a small stranger’s head from flopping backward, and there’s no curve.
When they hand her back, fingers reluctantly uncurling, shoulders dropping to their usual width, there’s often a strange politeness in the thank-you. As if we’d let them drive our car around the block. Sometimes they say it was easier than they thought. Sometimes they say nothing, and then later, over the last cup of tea, one of them tells my partner: I can’t believe you made that. I can’t even hold her right.
She says, “You will.” It comes out somewhere between a promise and a warning.
After they leave the apartment is too quiet. Our daughter, overloaded, crashes hard, arms flung up in the startle reflex, a pose that looks like surrender and is apparently left over from falling out of trees. The couch holds the shape of everyone who sat on it.
“Do you think they’ll have kids?” I ask.
My partner shrugs. “I don’t know.”
Drafted is the word I keep landing on. There’s a knock at the door, and the knock is your baby crying, and you’re in it. You can say you’re good all you want. The only real decision left is whether you keep pretending you’re visiting the front or admit you live here.
I sit there feeling tender toward every one of them. When I think about my own first days I mostly remember waiting for someone to tell me I was doing it wrong, and my partner putting her hand over my hand and adjusting the angle of our daughter’s head without saying you’re bad at this. Fear and love were so tangled I couldn’t get them apart. I assume that’s true for the men on the couch too, though I’ve never asked.
It would be satisfying if I could report that on the fifth or seventh visit some man walked in, reached straight for her, and broke the spell. It hasn’t happened.
So the ritual continues. Someone knocks, hands over a Tupperware and a toy, sits down, and is quietly invited to decide what kind of person he is. Our daughter, who has no idea she’s become a test, chews her fist and watches the light move on the wall. None of this is her doing. She’s simply here, and the adults keep arriving, and keep trying not to drop anything.
How tender and weird. A prayer: one day we will become a people used to seeing our babies cradled in the arms of their fathers. Interesting, and maybe prophetic as well as explanatory, that grandfathers mostly look like old hands in this role. Congratulations on the love and bravery it takes to assume the mantle of parents in this world.
Beautiful. thankyou Waleed.
My son was born by C section. His mother was taken off to the recovery area. The nurse picked him up and was about to walk away. I said 'could I hold him'. It was a life changing moment.