06/03/2026
Nobody told me the hardest part of being a new dad wasn’t the....
sleep deprivation or the anxiety or even the fear of doing something wrong.
It was the speed.
I remember sitting in the hospital parking lot the night we got the ultrasound results. Just sitting there. Engine off. Staring at this tiny black and white printout thinking — I don’t even know you yet and I’m already terrified of losing you. Not to anything dark. Just to time. To the way life moves whether you’re ready or not.
And then she arrived and I was right to be scared.
The first three months are a blur I will never fully recover. I was so exhausted I forgot to be present. I’d reach for my phone to take a picture and she’d already moved. Already changed. I have thousands of photos and somehow none of them captured the thing I was actually trying to hold onto. That feeling. That specific, unrepeatable version of her that existed for exactly one week and then became someone slightly different.
My wife would catch me just… watching her sleep. Not filming. Not photographing. Just watching. Because I knew the moment I looked away she’d be a little older.
One night I was going through old files on my laptop and found the original ultrasound scan. Just sitting there in a folder called “misc.” I stared at it for a long time. That was the first moment I ever saw her. Before the chaos. Before the sleepless nights. Before I even knew what her cry sounded like. Just her, curled up, safe, and completely still.
I didn’t want it living in a folder anymore.
I ended up putting it inside a snow globe. One of those custom ones where they engrave the image inside the glass. My wife thought I was being sentimental. I probably was. But it’s sitting on my desk now and every single day I look at it. It’s the one image of her that doesn’t move. Doesn’t age. Doesn’t change.
Everything else does.
People keep telling me it gets easier. I don’t think that’s true. I think you just get used to the grief of it.
The quiet grief of a parent watching their child become who they’re going to be, one ordinary Tuesday at a time.
