I’m not built for this. Never was. The concept of being responsible for another human being, one whose skull, impossibly fragile, fits entirely in the palm of my hand, it’s terrifying in a way that makes every other fear I’ve ever had seem like amateur hour.
Two weeks. Charlie’s been breathing air for two weeks, and already I understand that everything I thought mattered before was bullshit. Complete bullshit. Tesla had it right, this tiny creature is now plugged into the machinery of existence, every photon and sound wave making contact with nerve endings so new they barely know what to do with the information. And somehow, impossibly, my DNA helped build this.
The thing nobody tells you, or maybe they did and I just couldn’t hear it over my own self-absorption, is that you’re not prepared. I thought I was. I read things, we had a plan, I imagined myself rising to the occasion. Then I’m holding this impossibly small person, so exhausted that I’m terrified I might suddenly fall asleep and drop him, and realizing I’ve never been more unqualified for anything in my life.
His head in my hand. Warm. Real. Breathing. This almost abstract concept of “consequence” suddenly has a face, literally the size of a fucking grapefruit, and needs me not to screw up. The weight of that is crushing and clarifying all at once.
I spent years cultivating detachment, irony, a protective shell of cynicism. Two weeks old and Charlie has obliterated all of it. I’m raw. I’m exposed. I’m standing here looking at this tiny engine Tesla wrote about, and I’m thinking: How? How did I make something like this? Something perfect, when I am so definitively imperfect?
I don’t have answers. Just this overwhelming sense that I’m in something now, something real and permanent and utterly irreversible.
When a child is born its sense-organs are brought in contact with the outer world. The waves of sound, heat and light beat upon its feeble body, its sensitive nerve-fibres quiver, the muscles contract and relax in obedience: a gasp, a breath, and in this act a marvelous little engine, of inconceivable delicacy and complexity of construction, unlike any on earth, is hitched to the wheel-work of the Universe.