If I lived forever

Social media has become a strange place during the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020. One of my friends posted a question, and it has spawned a great deal of conversation and camaraderie among my friends. The question is:

Tell me your favorite memory with me

When my wife inevitably asked the question, I sat with this for a moment. I found answering this publicly to be a difficult undertaking.

Even though I find it joyous, my answer is still packed with emotion. My lifes circumstances, the least of which are toxic cultural ideals about men, have made it difficult to express my true self whenever emotions are much above idle RPM's. I tried to avoid the honest answer because it might reveal some side of myself that isn't stoic and harsh and there is a part of my brain that still tries to tell me I will get bullied if I reveal a true emotion. Once I identified that as a hesitation, I gave it the ol' double birds and wrote what my heart held.

The nurse handed me a little blue skinned lump of swaddled crying. I barely knew how to hold a baby. You where still cut open and they where putting everything back in (mostly) the right places and sewing you up. It was intense, there was a real chance before this moment that we could have lost either you or our baby boy.

I brought this little crying newborn down so you could see him for the first time. You said to him “Hello my beautiful son” and he instantly stopped crying. That was the first time I saw our son smile. The sound of your voice was so familiar to him that it was the first source of comfort he had after entering the world.

If I live a thousand years I would be shocked to ever witness a moment more beautiful and more powerful than the first time a mother meets their baby.