The day my life changed forever…
Putting on my Dad 🧢
Having a baby was something that my wife and I planned.
We started dating July 2013, engaged in January 2016, and married in May 2017. Life was progressing beautifully for us and we both felt parenthood was right around the corner.
After We moved to San Diego for my work, we almost immediately started to look for a home to plant a family in. Until we were prepared to buy our first place though, her mother and father suggested we stay with them while we look. It was the perfect plan: Stay with the in-laws, save a ton of money, find a place, and start a family. Everything was going according to plan, sort of.
We wanted to ensure she didn’t LOOK pregnant while we were staying with her parents because there is no way I could look her father in the eyes with him knowing I may have knocked up his daughter under HIS roof. And when I say “we” I mean “me”. Between her and I, I was the more anxious one about making sure our family developed according to plan. Having had a haphazard childhood and young adulthood, I felt I “knew” what the correct order of relationship development WASN’T. That is another story we can touch on later,
Though.
My wife’s father is someone who I respect, was intimidated by, and would partially fear during the infancy of our partnership. He was a man who showed me every gun he owned the first time I met him. He’s a man who thinks a samurai sword makes a better Christmas decoration on the mantle than the nativity scene. He’s a man who invited me to go shooting with him and told me I could “hold the target”. Let’s not forget he also was polishing his revolver the day I asked him his permission to marry his daughter. To say I’d be uncomfortable with my pregnant wife sitting at the breakfast table with him and I every morning while the coffee brews is a gargantuan understatement.
With that in mind, we felt it would be in our best interest to wait until we were close to finding a permanent home to call our own. At that point we would stop using birth control. Although time frames were officially set, impatience played its part and we got the ball rolling just a little earlier then planned. Baby fever had officially overtaken me and I wanted to be a daddy! So...from late January on, we were “trying”, which put us a few months out from actually buying a home.
Skip forward to mid April, no signs of a baby yet, no morning sickness, and no pregnancy tests peed on (that I was aware of). We had just been “practicing” which despite my desire to garner the title “daddy-to-be”, I was enjoying just fine. Wink wink. Nudge nudge. (Sorry babe, had to. LOL)
It was a few days before my birthday and we were enjoying a relaxing walk by the Coronado shore and little did I know she had prepared a couple gifts for me! One I would receive right then, another would become apparent in a few hours. The following was gift one:
Life in that moment as I knew it, changed. For good. I was a father. Ironically, I was also wearing a dad hat. I had never been so in love with my wife then at that moment (second only to our wedding), and never had I been so naive about what was ahead of me.
Also, yes I know I probably could have had a classier response, something I could proudly show my mom, but “Shut the fuck up.” came out. Not super proud of that but that was as genuine as it gets. And as you can see, I was over the moon after it fully set in.
Gift two ended up being a surprise “dirty thirty” pub crawl with a group of some of my closest friends. I was STOKED, but I had to keep my mouth SHUT.
“Don’t tell anyone yet, anything could happen over the next month or two and as hard as it’s going to be not telling everyone tonight, it’ll be harder giving them the news if things go south.” She was right. Of course she was right.
While I was engulfed in the bliss of the news, I celebrated like I never had before. Having to keep such glorious information to myself that night while surrounded with a group of my best friends that I consider family was nothing short of an extreme challenge. I had to channel all of my energy and excitement into celebrating without revealing anything, and thanks to another new dad, Brandon Morales, I was able to.
He was the sole individual that evening we confided in due to the fact he had just had a child himself and understood our current situation. Brandon also appreciated how difficult it would be for my wife to order beers and somehow discreetly not drink them. He was a great confidant that night, and drunker than he had been in a long time. Thanks bud!
Knowing I would be a father to a beautiful baby sent me to another level of elation. I CREATED LIFE with my BEST FRIEND! Wow! I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around this yet, but I knew that I couldn’t let that initial feeling slip away too quickly. So I didn’t. It was a high I’ve never experienced. I felt incredible. Unshakeable. Invincible. I celebrated, and laughed, and drank, and danced. Not only did I dance but It would be the only night of my life thus far that I would channel my inner coyote ugly and do so on a bar top, because I was in fact in that moment, on top of the world.
-Shayne McKinney
