Column: In Praise of Child-Rearing

Then, almost all of a sudden, the convulsions become overwhelming and a nurse helps place my wife in a sitting position, before telling her to push. It is all fused in my memory as a short and intense blurb, but it actually took a good half an hour before, from under my wife, a small, mostly hairless mammal appeared. The nurse grabbed it, showed it to me, shouted “it’s a girl!” before depositing it onto my wife’s chest.

We had just become parents. I had just become a dad.

What the actual f–k?