The Odinist at the Splash Pad

It’s always a fraught moment when somebody recognizes my necklace, which I realize is strange – the point of wearing a Thor’s Hammer is to publicly identify oneself as a Heathen, after all – but I’m still caught off-guard every time it happens. I’m forced to make a swift evaluation of my surroundings and my social context. Who is this person? What assumptions are they making about me? What assumptions do they think I will make of them?

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?