The moment

Welcome Sohum ❤️ February 17, 2024.

Every father has their own moment when it becomes real. When having a kid goes from living in your head to living in your heart.

With Sohum, my moment came at 2am, about 18 hours after he was born. After going through labor the previous night and seeing our closest friends & family through the day, it was just the three of us for the first time. We were all fast asleep in our hospital room. 

I started to hear him waking up in his crib. Having just read about the benefits of skin-to-skin contact. I quickly took off my shirt, unswaddled him, and held his skin against my chest. He stopped crying and a minute later, opened his eyes to look up at me.

And in that moment, with our eyes locked on one another, I felt a feeling I had never felt before. Here was this person who now meant the world to me. Overcome with my own emotion, I held him even tighter against my chest. 

I never wanted to let him go.

And yet.

As the reality of our new lives has settled in over the last few weeks, I realize that he is not mine to hold. I am learning that the greatest gift I can give him is to love him without projecting my own ego, desires, and attachment.

Last week we took Sohum for his first visit to the pediatrician. Outside the doctor’s office, I saw a poem that beautifully captured what I was feeling:

“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.”

—Khalil Gibran

Welcome to the world, Sohum. We can’t wait to see where your journey takes you.