Everything Is The Same Except Everything Is Different
In which the world gets bigger and smaller
About 12 hours before the birth of my daughter, I realized with a mix of fear and relief that I wasn’t ready for what was coming next. Logistically, everything was good to go: crib built, diapers bought in bulk, book on sleep training (partially) read. And because my fiancee was being induced into labor, we had the relative luxury of knowing the exact date that our child would be born — no frantic sprint to the hospital in the middle of the night for us.
But in that moment I knew, with crystalline clarity, that I knew nothing. I could read every baby book on the planet and pile up all the money in the universe, and it would still amount to the same: there would be no guarantees or certainties. All I knew for sure was that everything would change, even as so much would remain the same.
What’s hard to square about life is that it can both be divided into distinct segments and exist nonetheless on an unbroken continuum. One day I don’t have a child and then the next day I do, and those days somehow fall within the same week and month and year. There are cuts on my fingers that existed before her and that remain unhealed even as she draws breaths. She has existed for longer than that, for weeks and months, but even as a very real physical being in the womb, she has felt far more theoretical than actual. Until now, she was a series of photos tacked to the fridge showing her gradual development, a blurry ghost with occasionally recognizable features rising out of the gray and black sonogram murk. She was a flurry of kicks and ripples under the surface of my fiancee’s skin, the feeling of which never stopped being strange. She was the mountain of tiny clothing awaiting her in the nursery, the empty spot in a bassinet, the car seat installed with modest difficulty and no shortage of expletives ahead of her arrival. She was my future tense daughter.
And now she’s here. Bernadette Lou Ostby Tayler, born Feb. 4, 2025, at 9:45 am, who came into the world howling and nameless, making me briefly weak in the knees as the realization of her existence plowed into me at full speed. She’s real has been the refrain on my mind ever since — every time I hold her or look into her eyes or watch her sleep. The feeling coursing through me in the weeks leading up to her birth reminded me of the anticipation before a trip, counting down days and dreading the time at the airport but knowing that something brilliant awaited. That’s what she is: brilliant. She is a gorgeous flash that lights up my face. When I look at her, I soften, my whole body loose and calm in a way I’ve never known. I couldn’t have imagined what this would be like, and for that I’m glad. To experience it fresh with no expectations and no advanced knowledge — to come into it without any certainty — is as close as I’ll ever know to being born myself.
I carry no small amount of guilt over bringing a human being into a world of rising oceans and resurgent right-wing nationalism and increasingly baroque Oreo flavors. Every day around us, a tower I thought previously indestructible collapses, or a fire grows bigger. The clock ticks ever closer to midnight. When she cries, I tell her that she’ll be okay, that Daddy is here and that he’ll always keep her safe, even though I know that I can’t. But I will try in every way I can to protect her and the world she’ll inherit. In the brief time she’s been here, she’s changed my life immeasurably and forever, and I’ll spend the rest of it fighting for hers.