Coming soon:

a poppy seed, a Tootsie Pop, a Tamagotchi... a baby

Ash and I both said it today on Instagram, but I wanted to tell you here too, and a bit more besides: we are having a baby!

Wonder of wonders, I am not the birthing parent in this situation. Ash is. Ash is thirteen weeks pregnant. We are thrilled and excited and overwhelmed and a million other things, but the thing I feel most is happiness for Ash, who has wanted to be a biological parent for as long as they can remember. Ash was born to be a parent. I know people say that all the time, but I know it for a fact, having watched them co-parent June for the past almost-six years.

There’s both so much I want to say and also, strangely, so little. I feel very aware of the fact that this is not my pregnancy. I’m glad to have had the experience myself of once being pregnant and giving birth, because that history is helpful, useful to us, but it’s also not indicative of much. Every pregnancy is different. I don’t want to impose the story, the observations, the lessons of my own pregnancy and new motherhood onto Ash. I want them to have their own experience, and they already are, morning sickness and all. Meanwhile, I sometimes forget, often for the better part of a day, that we are even having a baby. Is this what it’s like to be a dad? God. I am embarrassed to find that I often have to work to match Ash’s enthusiasm when they inform me that the baby is the size of a poppy seed, or a Tootsie Pop, or a Tamagotchi. When I was pregnant, I couldn’t imagine how anyone could not be absolutely entranced by the minutiae of my fetus’s development. Being the non-birthing partner is a whole other thing — an abstract idea, a mostly mental endeavor, a radical practice of empathy.