When my first son was born, I didn’t recognize him. Of course I didn’t. I’d never seen him before in my life. I felt joy and relief and awe as I watched him blink his dark, swollen eyes in the harsh hospital light, but he was still just some baby. And though I knew we were connected on a profound, even cosmic level, it didn’t feel that way.

I went home and slept. The next morning, I walked into the room ready for my first day as a dad, but as I held him skin to skin, watched him feed and sleep, I didn’t feel any different. I wasn’t anybody’s father. That would be absurd.

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He went to the NICU — slight breathing problems, jaundice, no big deal. I wore a wristband with my name on it, but the nurses called me what they call all men: Dad. It felt like a game, like how my wife smiled when she referred to me as her husband those first few weeks of our marriage.

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We went home. I spent all day and night helping my wife care for him, but Dad didn’t seem to apply to me. The word seemed to describe someone whose identity was fixed for good. To be a father was to arrive somewhere, but I still felt like I was just barely on my way.

My wife understood my feelings but didn’t share them. I’m a pro when it comes to manufactured anxiety, but she’s much more stable. Plus, while I did my part in summoning him to this planet, my wife was the one who brought him here. In a very real way, she had been a mother for 41 long weeks by the time my son even showed his face, and once he did, she fed him from her own body. Compared to that? I was incidental.

Weeks passed. The first hints of my son’s personality appeared: his easy disposition, ready smile, and constant, self-important, nonsensical babbling. I fell in love with my son, but I didn’t feel like his father. When he slept, my wife and I would read or watch TV. A good fictional world makes you forget who you are for a while, but once a show ends or a book is closed, it all comes back in the space of a heartbeat. For me, a few more heartbeats would pass before I’d remember: There’s a baby in this apartment. It was a surprise every time. It felt like gas bubbles in my brain, not painful, exactly, but strange. Real dads didn’t forget their kids existed. So what did that make me?

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Maybe when he calls me Dad, I thought, I’ll feel it then.

At first, he called me Ba. A good start, but he called bananas that too, and the remote control, and the sky, and whatever else he could point at with his fat dimpled finger. When finally I was Daddy, it felt great, but I can’t say I really believed him. What did he know?

I knew, even then, that this was all in my head. I’m obsessed with identity, with what it means to be one person and not any other. That obsession drives me to be a fiction writer, it shapes my relationships, and it animates my thinking about myself. But it’s uncomfortable. Looking back, it’s likely that I thought fatherhood would save me from that discomfort. Maybe I didn’t want to have to question who I was any more. I wanted to have arrived.

But that’s a lot to ask from a kid. Too much, I think.

He started crawling, eating, talking. I did what I should have done from the start. I let go. Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” He meant it as a warning, but it works the other way around, too. Pretend hard enough, and someday you’ll find you’re not pretending anymore. I pretended to be a dad. So what if I didn’t feel like a father? What did that even mean? I was acting like one, and that was all that mattered.

But then I learned that we were expecting again. Months before the due date, we were talking about attending a wedding in the fall and my wife said, “Maybe the kids can stay with my mom.”

“What kids?” I asked. I had no idea what she was talking about.

“Our kids,” she said, and she rolled her eyes with such force that I think she might have actually levitated for a second.

I understood then. By the time the wedding came around we’d have kids, like with an “s.” I laughed, not because it was funny but because I couldn’t fathom the truth of that idea. It was gas bubbles on the brain all over again, and it put me back in freak-out mode.

My second son was born at home, but his skin wouldn’t stay pink so our midwife suggested I take him to the hospital while my wife rested. By the time we got there he was bubble-gum peachy and doing great, but NICU doctors don’t take chances. I prepared to stay the night.

The nurses all called me Dad. I didn’t think it strange. I cringed when the doctor spent 10 minutes digging for a vein in the baby’s hand, but I wasn’t upset. I knew what questions to ask. I knew what answers to give. Crucially, I knew our time in the hospital would be over before I knew it. I didn’t notice how different it all felt until they left me alone. In a recliner, with the lights down low, I held him close. My arm started doing the newborn bounce without me even thinking about it. A hum reached my throat, the same song I sang to my older son at bedtime each night. I fell asleep.

The next morning, stiff and tired, I was still alone with the baby. I changed him. He hated it and squealed to let me know, but I didn’t so much as shush him. He’d get over it, I knew, and the faster I did my work the happier he’d be. Afterward, I cradled him again. It was then, with the monitors ticking and beeping, with an as-yet-unnamed baby in my arms, that it happened. The earth didn’t move under my feet, and there was no chorus of angels. It was so much simpler than all that, and so obvious that I couldn’t even bother obsessing over it anymore: I wasn’t pretending. I knew what to do. I didn’t even know this kid’s name, but I knew that whatever else I still was, whatever else I would ever be, I was his dad.

(Photos: Mark Ferguson)

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