The Day He Was Born
2026-08-02 · Warren, founder of Hey Susan · 4 min
This is a personal story, not medical advice. Every birth is different, and every hospital does things a little differently. If any of this sounds like your situation, please talk to your own doctor, not a blog post.
My wife needed an emergency procedure to deliver our son. I won't get into exactly what led there or which hospital we were in, it doesn't matter to the story, and it's not mine alone to tell in detail. What I remember is the room moving fast around us, and how strange it was that I felt so calm on the outside while everything in me wanted to trade places with her.
They gave her spinal anesthesia. Spinal anesthesia acts almost immediately — a single injection into the fluid around the spinal cord that numbs a woman's midsection and legs. That speed mattered for us, given how things had turned into an emergency. The anesthesiologist needed her to hold completely still. I remember asking her, quietly, to just stay still for me. She did. She had her game face on the whole time, the same look I'd seen on her before a hard exam or a hard meeting, just now aimed at something so much bigger. I watched a doctor we knew and trusted working next to her, and I held onto that.
Then he was born. There was blood, more than I expected, and for a few seconds he coughed and choked and didn't make a sound, which is the longest few seconds I've ever sat through. Then he cried, and moved, and the room exhaled with him. I was holding my wife's hand through all of it. When they carried him over to me a minute later, I cried too. I'm not a crier, normally. That day I was.
We didn't get to do skin-to-skin right away, my wife's procedure still had to be finished, and we were moved to a recovery room first. Skin-to-skin contact after birth is something many hospitals, birth centers, and NICUs now call by that name — for warmth, for calming both of you down, for a head start on feeding — but it doesn't have to happen in the first minute to still count. Once we were settled, I finally got him against my chest, and they weighed him: 7 lbs 11 oz.
For the first hour and a half or so, he was quiet. Sleepy, low energy, not much fuss at all, which surprised me because everything I'd read said newborns come out either screaming or rooting around for food. It turns out that's a normal, well-documented phase, newborns typically move through an alert period right after birth, then a deep-sleep or low-activity stretch that can last up to a couple of hours before waking up hungrier and more alert again. Nobody warned me about that part, so I spent that hour and a half quietly worried something was off, when really he was just doing exactly what newborns do. He'd turn out to be a genuinely high-energy kid once he woke up to it, but that first day, he was still catching his breath from being born, same as the rest of us.
I built Hey Susan for a lot of reasons, but at the time, I still didn't know I needed a tool like this. Looking back, I think that's the real reason: I want to raise the standard and close the gap in the skills you need to have a family. We've all been children before, but the first time you have your own, it really is your first time. You go into it cold, and I don't think any amount of training can prepare you for that.
(If you want to see how much easier things got once he was on a real rhythm, I wrote about the day we finally planned a trip around his schedule instead of fighting it — "The Drive, and the Nap That Actually Happened.")
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