My wife Poonam and I recently had our first child, a son. Baby Jei is about 21 days old now and I’ve been wanting to jot down my thought about the entire experience. Of course, having a newborn means you hardly have any sleep – so the act of putting thoughts into written form took somewhat of a backseat. And that is no joke, between the last sentence and this one it’s been 54 days (!!). Jei is now 75 days old and I’m glad wordpress saves draft blog entries 🙂 Anyway, here is a photo of Jei at day #2.
The actual feeling of fatherhood is quite incredible. I still recall very vividly the instant he was born. His cry was loud and almost instantaneous when he came out. The feeling was immensely joyful, something along the lines of “Wow, he’s finally here!” (with a giant smile plastered on my face!). The next emotion was quickly seeing mom and baby are doing fine (at least at basic levels via a quick visual check!). Then it starts sinking in that the tiny baby in your arms is part of you. From ground up, he is built, cell-by-cell using genetic material that comes from you. Of course, you yourself use genetic material refined over millions of years of evolution; but that doesn’t take away from the fact that in a very real way, he is part of you. That moment puts the ‘awe’ back into ‘awesome’ in the truest sense of it.
I don’t think I would be able to capture and transfer the emotions felt very easily. Explaining all that even to my own self (from, say, 12 months back) would be rather hard!
Anyway, now that he’s here it’s an unbelievably awesome experience. And I love it!