Proof of Life
I was told a lot of things about what having a kid would be like. The one you hear most often is that it’s life changing, and while that isn’t untrue it seems to me now that life hasn’t so much changed as it has ended and began again. That there is the life before Cora and the life after; a version of reality that was put to death the morning of her birth and a new one that’s been reconstituted, reborn. But if the first time you see your baby is something like a Damascan road experience I’ve found the conversion to be more of an ongoing process. Some daily practice of realigning priorities, of slow and messy sanctification bringing up to the surface the strongest and weakest parts of myself. The process of physically carrying the baby brings a kind of immediacy and connection for pregnant mothers that I can’t say I had as the other parent for a long while. It wasn’t until I actually met Cora in person that I could really call myself a dad, when the anticipated idea of her sudden...