Notes from the threshold of fatherhood | #68

I'm excited to meet my son

Sunday 2nd March 2025, London

My son is due on 15 March, and I'm surrounded by objects that imply his presence.

The empty bassinet, the changing table and chest of drawers filled with unfathomably tiny clothes each announce they will soon belong to a brand new someone. While for now he exists for me through these objects, as pictures from scans and as increasingly dynamic movements in his mother's belly, I'm excited to meet him in person.

I'm excited to see his face and feel for the first time that this is no ordinary baby; this is my baby.

I'm excited to be the one who gets to (try to) console him when the sheer vividness of Being outside his cosy womb becomes unbearable.

I'm excited for his voice to create a third note in what has so far been a harmonious dyad, and to enjoy the music we make whether the emergent triad is harmonious or discordant.

And I'm excited to embrace the intensity of a ride that never stops, that never lets me off the hook or gives me an easy time. I'm excited that his mere existence will deepen my capacity and appreciation for love, yearning, fear, regret, joy, pain and all the rest.

Yet at the same time, I'm unsettled.

Global events of the last few weeks, the increasing ubiquity of AI, and an ache of disorientation about the utility of my skills remind me that the world I grew up in—the one that felt like home, to me—is gone.

If I am to gift my son a world that feels, to him, like home, I must first grieve the loss of mine, otherwise I risk falling into a self-indulgent nostalgia and denial of reality as it is, neither of which will serve him (or me, for that matter).

I don't know how to make sense of reality right now, and I don't know if I would feel that so intensely if not for my upcoming responsibility for this precious new life. But that's exactly what I'm signing up for: I'm not allowed to opt out, nor to drift, nor to simply hope for the best. Not any more, because the consequences are no longer just my own.

I find myself standing on the threshold of a dream¹, and I can't help but wonder which side is which. I have this uncanny sense that despite the looming sleep deprivation, I'm about to experience something akin to waking up.

There are few decisions I've made in my life that have been truly irreversible, where stepping over a threshold has meant there's no stepping back. I can only imagine what's on the other side of that line.

Whatever it's like, though, I vow to embrace all of it, and all of him, wholeheartedly. It's both the least—and the most—that I can do.

impossibly tiny

1. terrific album, incidentally