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"    One month ago today, my wife changed our lives forever by delivering our first child into my hands, in an inflatable tub in our little house on Flathead Lake. I had nine months to wrap my head around becoming a father, but no amount of time could have prepared me for that moment, at 4:33 a.m., when the world shrunk to the size of our living room and I was waist-deep in water, looking into the eyes of my firstborn. These days, a man who&amp;#039;s expecting a child says we&amp;#039;re having a baby. I embraced this vernacular throughout my wife&amp;#039;s pregnancy. It portrayed a 21st-century, gender-neutral reflection of our impending parenthood. &amp;quot;My wife and I,&amp;quot; I would say, &amp;quot;we&amp;#039;re having a baby.&amp;quot; I suppose the word choice was designed to convey inclusion, empathy, and dedication to the cause. In hindsight, it also conveyed naivet\u00E9. My wife and I weren&amp;#039;t having a baby. My wife was having a baby. And although I couldn&amp;#039;t have known it then, birth is a solitary expedition, an odyssey my wife would take to the fiery edge of the earth and back. All I could ever hope to do was watch, and hang a lantern to guide her home.   I tried to come into this prepared. The internet helped\u2014it abounds with idiot-friendly pregnancy websites that happily treat you like the amateur you are. My wife and I found one early on that gave us a weekly synopsis of how our baby was growing. It was like the Cliff Notes to the saga unfolding in my wife&amp;#039;s womb. Alongside the interesting facts and did-you-knows, it gave us a weekly fruit, vegetable, or legume to approximate our baby&amp;#039;s size. At six weeks, we knew our baby existed by the faint blue line on a Safeway pregnancy test that we kept under the bathroom sink. At that moment, the website cheerily informed us, our baby was the size of a lentil. At 22 weeks, it was the size of a spaghetti squash. At 36, it was as big as a bunch of Swiss chard. I looked forward to these produce analogies every week. I even started an epic poem to my firstborn titled, &amp;quot;When you were the size of a lentil.&amp;quot; It reads like a grocery list. The weeks rolled by, from kumquat to rutabaga to leek, and before we knew it, our baby was the size of a pumpkin, and was knocking on the world&amp;#039;s door. Any parent will tell you that a baby&amp;#039;s due date is, at best, a guess. So when ours rolled around, we knew to be patient. Still, there are a handful of things you can do to naturally induce labor, and we tried them all. We walked, a lot \u2014 25 miles in five days. I cooked spicy Thai food. I massaged pressure points in my wife&amp;#039;s feet and calves, a Chinese tradition, apparently. I also stimulated her nipples \u2014 because somebody had to \u2014 which releases oxytocin, the body&amp;#039;s natural equivalent to the Pitocin doctors use to induce mothers in the hospital. All of it was to no avail, until the week after our due date, when my wife woke up with contractions that she felt in her back. This was it. Game on. We tried to carry on with our day as usual. We went for a walk in the forest. We ate an Indian lunch outside in the spring sun. She vacuumed the house. I spent too much time composing an email to my journalism students, explaining why class would be canceled. We were both, in our own ways, battening the hatches. When our affairs were sorted, we found ourselves downloading a contractions app on my wife&amp;#039;s iPhone. I&amp;#039;m usually not one for apps, but I soon saw the value of this one. Whenever my wife had a contraction, I&amp;#039;d press a green button. When it was over, I&amp;#039;d hit a red button. The app told us the frequency, duration and total number of contractions. Ever wondered how many contractions it takes to have a baby? It&amp;#039;s like asking how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. In our case, it was approximately 376. And we didn&amp;#039;t have the luxury of biting our way to the center. By about number 40 or so, my wife had three strong contractions on top of each other and our midwife started making her way down the valley. Montana is a small state by population\u2014it just crossed a million\u2014and it&amp;#039;s the sort of place where you recognize people by the vehicle they drive. Families know each other and communities are tight. So it would surprise Montanans less than others that our midwife is the same woman who attended the births of my wife and her older sister, 30-some years ago, in my wife&amp;#039;s childhood cabin down the valley. When I tell people this, they imagine a severe, matronly figure, maybe a nun. But our midwife is a hip, Prius-driving former pastry chef who lives at the north end of Flathead Lake in a simple loft cabin she designed herself in the Japanese style. She&amp;#039;s presided over more than 600 births throughout the region, and she&amp;#039;s excellent at what she does. So before our baby was even the size of a lingonberry, we knew we wanted her at the birth, and we knew we wanted the birth at home. Only 25,000 children are born at home in America each year, less than one percent of all births. Montana has the highest rate of homebirths, at 2.6 percent, a statistic to which my wife&amp;#039;s family has contributed. My wife&amp;#039;s mother and sister both delivered children at home, some of them in the same bed where they were conceived. I was drawn to this rugged resourcefulness when my wife and I first met. So when it came to be our time to plan a birth, it felt only natural that our firstborn would come into the world as my wife had \u2014 at home, surrounded by family. It also meant that we wouldn&amp;#039;t have an ultrasound, so our baby&amp;#039;s sex would remain a mystery. That was fine by us. We couldn&amp;#039;t imagine a surprise with more suspense. By late afternoon, our midwife was there, as was my wife&amp;#039;s family \u2014 her parents and two older sisters. They came with food, and filled our house with an expectant atmosphere that was festive but relaxed. My wife is the last in the line of six children to have kids of her own, so everyone in attendance had done this before. We shared some venison bourguignon and beer, told some stories, and walked down to the lake to catch the sunset. On the dock, my sister-in-law got on all fours so my wife could lean on her during the contractions. It was a clear night, and the last of the sun skittered across the lake and lit up the snow on the Mission Mountains. A pair of courting geese squawked by overhead. Darkness fell, and my wife&amp;#039;s contractions grew more intense. We&amp;#039;d given her father the iPhone by then. A retired beekeeper and ornithologist, he has a mind for data and a distaste for idleness, so he was perfect for the job. My wife would catch his eyes as a contraction would begin. He&amp;#039;d press the green button, and we&amp;#039;d all watch the wringing of her womb. Leaning on our dining room table, she rocked with an oceanic rhythm, undulating back and forth like a stipe of kelp. When the contraction passed, she&amp;#039;d raise her eyebrows at her father and he&amp;#039;d record the data. This became our routine. The contractions kept the tempo, rolling in and out like waves.  Between them, I&amp;#039;d managed to inflate the birthing tub, which was the size of a small car and took up most of our living room. Filling it with hot water took the better part of the evening. Our hot water heater couldn&amp;#039;t keep up, so my wife&amp;#039;s mother and sisters spent their time shuttling between the kitchen and the living room with boiling water. Swap the electric kettle for a samovar, and it could&amp;#039;ve been the 1850s. All that hot water turned our house into a sauna. The windows steamed up. People peeled off layers. I started to sweat. My wife climbed into the tub, and we all sat around her, as if gathering around a campfire. The contractions now took on a jungle quality. My wife gripped the handles on the sides of the vinyl tub and leaned forward, swinging her head from side to side like a wild animal, emitting noises I&amp;#039;d never heard leave her mouth.   After awhile, I put on a pair of trunks and crawled into the tub myself. I pressed on my wife&amp;#039;s lower back during the contractions, but often I&amp;#039;d hit the wrong spot and she&amp;#039;d move my hands away. Minutes ticked by, and I didn&amp;#039;t know what to do with myself. I felt like a kid in a bath with a tiger and no toys. At about midnight, I got out to pee, which was a relief, because I was also starving and extremely hot. I ducked into the kitchen to wolf down some chips and bread and mop the sweat from my pruned body. I was getting dehydrated, and felt a killer headache coming on, but I couldn&amp;#039;t abandon ship completely, so I climbed back into the water to try again to comfort my wife, who had by now morphed into a prize fighter on the ropes. She sat facing me, arms draped on the sides of the tub, gripping the handles so tightly that her forearms rippled. Her father mopped her sweaty brow. Her sister fed her ice cubes. Her mother fanned her face. She was bearing down now and she looked neither scared nor tired. She looked focused. Committed. Transcendent.  More time passed, and then something shifted. I noticed our midwife moving around the tub with more urgency, checking the baby&amp;#039;s heartbeat and organizing her supplies. The baby was descending. During contractions now, I put my hands on my wife&amp;#039;s hips and felt them quake. She felt the pressure of the baby now. We watched her waters break like a depth charge in the tub. And then I saw the beginnings of our baby. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s the head,&amp;quot; the midwife said. My heart sank. It wasn&amp;#039;t a head at all. It was a shriveled, grey mushroom cap, and I thought something was horribly wrong. I wondered when our midwife was going to say something, and then thought she was sensibly waiting until after the birth. I kept these thoughts to myself. &amp;quot;Good job, baby,&amp;quot; I said to my wife. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re doing such a good job.&amp;quot; And then the desiccated mushroom cap became a lemon, and then a pear, and soon it was a small melon. She kept pushing, and then the whole head emerged. &amp;quot;I see an ear,&amp;quot; my wife said. It looked like it was made of plastic. I held it in my hands, and startled when it turned. &amp;quot;It moved!&amp;quot; I said. Minutes later, the rest of our baby flopped out. He emerged underwater like a black and white photograph appears in a tray of solvent in the darkroom. At first there was nothing, and then there was him, a creature floating up in the ether from another universe. He was covered in waxy vernix, which made him look like an antique, yellowed doll. I lifted him from the water toward my wife&amp;#039;s chest, but couldn&amp;#039;t reach it because the cord was wrapped twice around his neck. I sat there, stupefied, holding my baby. My wife&amp;#039;s father swooped in to untangle him, and then he was on my wife&amp;#039;s breast, and someone put a towel around him. He didn&amp;#039;t cry. He whimpered some, furrowed his brow, and then surveyed the room and its spectators with his watery little eyes. Here, at last, was the being we could only imagine for nine months. Every breath now was a process of animation, a nine-month concept now coming to life.  &amp;quot;What do we have?&amp;quot; my wife asked me. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a boy!&amp;quot; I said. What I meant was it was the boy. It was our boy. Our boy with downy hair on his shoulders, a giant big toe like mine, and a dimple on his left cheek. Our boy, up from the waters and alive. This time, the inclusive vernacular felt entirely justified. A month later, it&amp;#039;s seven o&amp;#039;clock on a chilly spring morning, and I&amp;#039;m typing this one-handed. In my other arm is my son. He&amp;#039;s breathing heavily and whimpering like a puppy in his sleep. Looking down at his bald head, furrowed brow, and little earthworm lips, I still can&amp;#039;t believe that my wife and I made him, that I watched him exit her body, and that for the next eighteen years (or longer, depending on the economy), he is our absolute responsibility. Never before has my life changed so drastically, so suddenly. It&amp;#039;s been 26 days since our son&amp;#039;s birth. Parents will understand this lapse in time. The last three weeks have passed in a blur. In the first days, we could just sit and look at him, mesmerized, for hours. One sunny evening, I absentmindedly fell off our dock trying to get the perfect photograph of my wife holding him. I&amp;#039;ve learned that the sleep deprivation parents like to speak of is a reality that&amp;#039;s effective immediately. Again, it&amp;#039;s my wife who does most of the work here, waking up every two hours to nurse and burp him. I try to at least roll over and acknowledge my gratitude for her keeping our child alive. He&amp;#039;s changing every day, mainly getting cuter. Any parent will tell you their kid is cute, but ours suffered from an early deficit. He&amp;#039;s almost entirely bald and has a wrinkled forehead and furrowed brow that make him look constantly skeptical. At the dawn of his life, we have already compared our son to Wallace Shawn (the &amp;quot;inconceivable&amp;quot; character from The Princess Bride), Mayor Rob Ford, and Gov. Chris Christie. But he&amp;#039;s putting on weight. He smiles sometimes in his sleep. And the way he rolls his head back after breastfeeding and passes out like a fat, drunk man is one of the funniest things I&amp;#039;ve seen. It&amp;#039;s not all funny, for us or for him. His world and our world were turned upside down when he came out. Sometimes, when he&amp;#039;s just lying there, sleeping, he&amp;#039;ll fling out his arms like he&amp;#039;s falling from a great height. His face contorts with fear. This is something babies do, and it&amp;#039;s heartbreaking and hilarious at the same time. It&amp;#039;s as if, after nine months in a cramped, dark space, he&amp;#039;s suddenly overcome by the sheer width and breadth of his new world and has to throw out his arms to reach for its extremities. Parenthood has equivalent moments of terror. The day after our son was born, we woke to find him covered in red dots. We thought he&amp;#039;d been mauled by spiders. It turns out he had a common condition called erythema toxicum, which we made the mistake of looking up on Google images. It&amp;#039;s an allergic reaction that half of all babies get, some of them, it appears, far worse than ours. Then there was the oozing stub of his umbilical cord, which turned grey, then blackish green and smelled like fish sauce and death. We were worried, but it too was normal, though unbearably stinky. One night he developed a low fever, and now it was our brows that were furrowed as we fussed over him. At moments like these, it feels like we&amp;#039;re the ones who are flailing, throwing out our limbs to plumb the depths of these brand new feelings of profound love and equally profound fear. Some expecting couples worry that their child will rob them of some of their affection for each other. They wonder if their love will now be halved between their spouse and their child. My wife and I have experienced no such rationing. Watching my wife care for our son, it feels like she&amp;#039;s always been a mother. She&amp;#039;s never looked more beautiful. Her breasts are milk-filled and mesmerizing, capable of calming our son like nothing I possess. Her abdomen has deflated to a point where we can&amp;#039;t imagine she ever fit a baby inside it. Her skin his shining, her hair is lustrous. Even on four hours of sleep, she is riveting. My wife will, eventually, go back to work. In a 21st-century, gender-neutral way, we will split the responsibility of raising our boy as best we can. She&amp;#039;s been pumping milk and stockpiling little baggies in the freezer so I can feed him while she&amp;#039;s away. But that night, almost a month ago, when we sat together in a tub of water and I watched her become a mother, I was alerted to the reality that there are things she will do and feel and experience that I will never know, that our son will never know. It is a wondrous thing this motherhood, the most extraordinary ordinary achievement that surrounds us every day. And on this Mother&amp;#039;s Day, I will do what every man should and all that we can: stand back and revere it for the miracle it is.  This piece originally appeared on Esquire. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.redbookmag.com/life/mom-kids/news/a17730/mothers-day-ritual-esquire/>