"When Loulou was born, I was in the delivery room watching the whole thing.
I remember two things: The sun, rising over the East River, filling the room with a shimmering gold light. And Loulou, being pulled out feet first, like a prize flounder.
I leaped to my feet and uttered a phrase of Churchillian heft: "Bloody hell, she's enormous!
It's odd. There's how you feel, and then there's how you think you should feel. In the movies, when people have kids, they're welcomed into the world with a cracking fusillade of manly backslapping and tears. It's one of life's BIG events. I just felt weird.
How could I be a father? Wasn't that something that happened to other people? To adults?
Was I overwhelmed in a tsunami of love? Not really...
I resented the cultural pressure that demanded only one response from me. When I told people I didn't like fatherhood very much, their faces would wrinkle like a walnut. They'd look at me as though I'd taken off all my clothes, and the results were slightly unpleasant.
It wasn't that I didn't feel responsible for Loulou. I was there to change diapers, to get up in the middle of the night, to do whatever needed to be done. But I felt no emotional connection. It was like trying to have a relationship with a sea sponge, or a single-cell protozoa. She didn't DO anything. Or at least, nothing I could understand."
