When do you start to feel like a father? For Brian Gresko, it was during a solo visit to the NICU after a traumatic delivery.

In the movie The Matrix, Morpheus tries to convince Neo that he has the power to manipulate the “reality” of their computer-simulated world. “There’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path,” Morpheus says.

All fathers have a singular moment when they become a father. I don’t mean intellectually, when a man learns a baby’s on the way. I mean emotionally, when something changes in a man’s heart.

“When I held you for the first time, I knew,” my dad told me. “I wanted to be there to watch this kid grow up.”

Recently, a daddy acquaintance shared his breakthrough story with me: “I didn’t want a kid, and then, when I held her, that was it. I think I spent the next month in tears.” Now he’s a stay-at-home dad.

Many men begin walking the path of fatherhood the moment they first hold their child. For me, however, it took hours before I felt fatherhood in my heart.

I remember clearly the first time I saw my baby boy.

“That’s him,” the midwife said. She pointed at what looked like a meatball deep inside the folds of my wife’s vagina. “Your son.”

“It is?”

I couldn’t make sense of what I’d just seen. In many ways, my son had been an abstraction to me throughout the pregnancy. We learned his gender in utero partly for this reason. Knowing we had a boy in there helped us—me in particular—feel closer to him. 

Though often that connection was tenuous at best. Usually he seemed like an alien form feeding off of my wife, rippling her abdomen when he shifted and kicked, slowing her down as he grew bigger, a parasite that left her easily exhausted and irritable. While she sometimes dreamed of her baby boy, even subconsciously I couldn’t put a face or body to him. Physically, the boy existed outside of my reality. And I wondered when I would start to feel love for him.

Even during the labor, my concern rested more on my wife than on my unborn son. We had decided to use a hospital birthing center. We didn’t want drugs, machines, or medical interventions to be a part of the birth experience. For hours my wife labored in what looked more like a hotel than a hospital room. It had a Jacuzzi and a comfortable double bed. In the darkness of the early morning hours, we kept the lamps soft and dim. After dawn, we opened the curtains to the overcast sky. Aside from our midwife and a nurse, we were alone.

By midmorning, not long after the midwife showed me the meatball, it became obvious that something was wrong. My son simply wasn’t coming out.

For almost four hours my wife pushed. Blood and amniotic fluids stained the sheet beneath her. When the contractions swept through, she shrieked until the pain became too intense and could only gasp. The midwife tried a multitude of techniques—shifting positions, different styles of breathing, ways to visualize pushing—but the baby refused to come.

Eventually, a doctor consulted with us. He would help us get the baby out, he explained. My wife had weakened after 23 hours of labor, and the frequent and intense contractions were stressing the baby. Despite our intentions, the time had come for an intervention.

Rather than the natural light of the birthing center, a flat fluorescence gleamed off of every surface in the delivery room. Machines beeped and flashed as monitors marked my wife’s vitals and our son’s heartbeat. Stirrups supported her legs. Bright bulbs hanging on mechanical arms bore down on us. A small crowd of people in blue scrubs buzzed around the table.

The doctor produced a vacuum device, a hoop of sorts that would seal to that shape I had seen—the top of my son’s head. As my wife pushed, the doctor would pull. The midwife administered a local anesthetic to dull the pain of the episiotomy, a necessary cut to fit the device.

When I saw my wife’s blood, a thick black against the royal blue of the delivery table, I averted my eyes. My chest constricted, my head went feather-light. A nurse, seeing how I teetered on the edge of losing it, directed me to keep encouraging my wife. I croaked out the most positive things I could think of—“You’re almost there, honey!”—but at this late point in the game, I didn’t believe them. So much had gone awry.

The next time I looked down, the majority of my son’s head had emerged. The textured part of the meatball had been his hair, swirled close against his skull by the amniotic fluid. He had turned to one side and his bottom lip wasn’t visible—he was sucking on it so hard. His eyes were closed.

When my son’s body slipped out, a gush of brown meconium followed. I registered his purple, almost bruised skin before he went out of sight, placed on a plastic tray and surrounded by pediatric staff. Relief that my wife had made it through brought me near tears, but, as far as the kid was concerned, I felt cold. Removed.

Then my wife said softly, “Why isn’t he crying?”

I realized that aside from the monitors’ metronomic beeps, the room had quieted. The midwife, the nurses, the obstetrician, all worked in silence.

Then the pediatrician announced, “We have a heartbeat—and it’s strong,” and the room released its breath. But on the APGAR test, the boy only scored a five out of 10.

The pediatrician passed the baby to the midwife, who placed him in my wife’s arms. The baby bubbled at the mouth as my wife whispered his name, and he made strange grunting sounds, raspy with congestion. The midwife took him from my wife and whipped him around, roughly, like a doll, to massage his back. His skin remained mottled, ghost white beneath angry red splotches. The labor had beat him up.

Then the midwife dropped him into my arms. I felt nervous to hold him— I’d never held a baby before!—but also like it wasn’t my place. My wife had worked so hard, struggled so much—she should have him. I wanted to remain apart until everything was declared OK. Then I would be able to relax and feel this thing that had happened.

But he stayed there against my chest, his eyes a brilliant blue, with a yellowish froth around his mouth. The noises he made sounded more animal than human.

“Should he be grunting like this? Is that normal?”

A nurse took him from me and placed him back on the tray, and the pediatrician syphoned a viscous muck of bloody mucus from his mouth. And then, while my wife and I watched in silence, they wheeled him out.

Our newborn son was gone.

As the midwife stitched up my wife, she explained that the baby had been taken to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. He was having trouble breathing—maybe, she said, from inhaling fluid from being in the birth canal for so long.

Talking, we found it difficult to even remember what he looked like, it happened so fast. I could picture the bright blue eyes, and his lipless profile that first time I saw him. Otherwise? The details were mutable.

We made calls to family, and this, finally, upset us, because rather than sharing good news, we faced questions that we didn’t have the answers to. What happened? Why didn’t the birth go smoothly? What’s wrong with our son? How long will he be in the NICU?

After a few hours, a doctor in yellow scrubs came to explain that the midwife’s prognosis had been correct. My son’s lungs were filled with fluid. He had to be intubated. My wife was in no state to get up, but I could see him if I wanted.

The doctor directed me to a room full of plastic incubating units. All manner of babies rested in them, some tiny and premature, others of healthier size and complexion. Though most slept, the room was bright and humming with equipment. Some of the computers even played tinny, synthesized lullabies, which I would learn was a form of music therapy.

The sight of these helpless infants beginning their lives hooked up to a machine rather than at their mother’s breast saddened me, until a more depressing thought occurred—I didn’t even know which of the babies was mine.

Sensing this, a nurse waved me over. There, near one wall, lay my son, his little body splayed under a bright warming lamp, naked except for the tiniest of diapers. A tube down his throat forced his mouth open a bit. Smaller pipettes attached to his nostrils. Pads for measuring his heart and respiration were stuck to his chest by cheerful animal stickers. Another monitor had been clipped to his foot.

I will always remember this image far more clearly than I do the first time I held him.

The nurse explained that he was on a machine to measure his respiration, that when it dropped below a certain level he received a blast of oxygen to help him breathe. Already, she assured me, his condition had improved.

She left me alone, standing awkward in front of the tray. My son’s eyes were closed, his coloring better. He looked more like a normal baby.

“Felix,” I said, not sure if I had even said his name before, in the delivery room. “It’s me. Daddy.”

He stirred, moving his head toward me. I placed a finger in his hand. He squeezed it and his eyes became slits, gazing in my direction.

“Daddy’s here, Felix,” I said.

His name still felt strange in my mouth, but less so. This was Felix, my son, my baby. With his soft digits wrapped around my index finger, the protective urge I had felt for my wife grew and expanded to include this little guy. I could imagine his weak limbs strong, bigger, moving. Those blue eyes open, recognizing me.

His fingers tightened around mine, this time holding on. A reflex, I knew. But it wouldn’t always be.

“Daddy’s here, and everything’s going to be all right.”

I didn’t just think it, I believed it. I was this beautiful boy’s father, and I was going to do everything in my power to ensure his safety.

I wish I had one of those stories in which the first time I held my son my heart swelled to bursting as the world changed—a Hallmark moment. The trauma of the birth prevented that. It pushed me into an emotional state of panic and worry.

Time needed to pass for my inner dad to manifest. But that deep sense of connection, of responsibility and love, has stayed with me. I’ve never since questioned my fitness as a father.

I’ve known, through and through, straight down to my bones. I love that kid more than anything.

Brian Gresko is a stay-at-home dad, aspiring novelist, contributor to Huffington Post, and columnist for Patch. Keep up with him on his sporadically updated blog and via his Twitter feed.

–This piece was originally published at the Good Men Project.

—Photo LisaW123/Flickr