“I can’t wait to meet him.” I repeated that over and over for months. “I just can’t wait to see who he is, what he becomes. No matter who he is, no matter what, he’s going to be beautiful.”

I remember those first moments when I realized I would be a father for the first time. There was a strong sense of responsibility mixed with wonder and a glimpse into the far future.

It was both simple and impossibly complex. Sperm had mixed with egg and now a life form was growing, the size of an insect, then an acorn, then a lemon, then an apple, steadily developing over time. A mix of everything I am and everything she is, perfectly blended in an impossibly perfect creation. Would he have my crooked jaw, her freckly arms, my creative mind, her empathy and devotion?

Every moment after that was different from every one that had come before. Before, I lived my life in days. Before, I collected things, I worked overtime, I planned vacations and adventures. After, I lived my life in years, seeing my child even before I knew him, growing day by week by year into an old and accomplished man. After, I thought of solid foundation, platforms and jumping off points, legacies and integrity.

And then that moment where the ultrasound jelly spread and that little image came up on the screen, foggy and alien. And that underwater swishing heartbeat. And the words, “It’s a boy”, distinguishable only by a tiny speck between his zygote legs.

And suddenly, “I’m a father” became “I’m having a son,” and my world turned again. Legacy again, and foundation, but also a pride, a security, a kernel of new definition in my very center.

“I’m having a son.”

And all of that, all of those feelings and transformations, how much more they must have been for Megan, with new life in her center. A growing, changing life form, half her and half me, at her core. What she ate, he ate. What she felt, he felt. What she heard, he heard.

I remember placing my hand on her stomach as she slept in those early days, and picturing my son, smaller than my very hand, growing there. Billions of births to billions of parents the world over, yet this was mine. This was now my entire world.

And everything fatherhood meant to me, motherhood must mean to her. The sacredness, the fragility, the expansion of soul and spirit and being. A literal cord connecting one life to another, the child protected only by a thin layer of liquid and form, miracle of miracles yet so vulnerable, so easily broken while so full of potential. Fragile and miraculous, the perfect recipe for life.

That moment, with my hand on her stomach as she breathed, I thought of mothers. I thought of Megan’s mother, working so hard for years to get pregnant, involving medical interventions and heartbreak after heartbreak before Megan came in to the world. And I thought of my own mother, pregnant five times before bearing me, her life changing as her marriage strained. I pictured arms wrapped around infants, the passage of milk and heartbeat, sleeplessness and worry, affection and nurturing.

My mother bore seven children. 63 months pregnant, over five years of her life as a vessel for new life. Now, in her 70s, she looks at her children grown, decades old, with children of their own, and she views them with the same love and worry, the same fragility and wonder.

Megan would bear two. Two sons, my sons and hers, with their blue eyes and tousled hair, their creative imaginations, their laughter and dancing and scrawled ‘Happy Moms Day’ messages on white paper over stick figure families.

What worlds we have created, what gods we have become in making these little men. From our mothers and fathers to us, from us to them. What purpose they give us. And as they change and grow and expand and become, we watch them, changing and growing and expanding and becoming ourselves as our mothers and fathers watch us, in turn changing and growing and expanding and becoming.

My heart is full as I think of the mothers in my life, the one who gave me life and the one that created new life with me.

And then my thoughts turn to my most sacred space, standing in sunlight, two small hands firmly in each of mine, looking forward to the horizon.