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I was completely unprepared. Absolutely clueless. Oh, I knew about the changes everyone talks about. I went to six weeks of parenting classes for expectant mothers and fathers, so I knew about the cabinets and the electrical outlets. I knew about the table corners, and the cleaning products, and the insecticides. I learned about care and feeding, and the changes that are better approached with the aid of a breathing apparatus. Hell, I could even perform infant CPR. Probably.

External. All that stuff is external. Everyone tries to prepare you for the external stuff, like that's where the big changes are. But there are changes they don't tell you about in parenting class. Sure, your physical world will never be the same, but that's small potatoes compared to the internal upheaval that's coming. The convulsion that takes everything you ever felt or knew, or thought you knew, puts it in a bag, shakes it up and dumps it back out again. Dumps it back out in a pile that you don't recognize. It makes you question every opinion, every value, every truth you had arrived at, and thought to be firmly held. Fatherhood. The great humbler.

A couple of years before my son was born, I sat in the living room of two friends who had recently given birth to their second child. As the father sat rocking his infant son, who was asleep on his chest, he looked knowingly at me and smiled. "It don't git no better'n nis," he said. (It's okay, he's from Virginia.) I smiled back. "I know," I replied, nodding. But I didn't know. I couldn't have known.

You go through life, in my case until age forty-two, believing that you know, and understand, how your parents feel about you. They love you. Of course they love you, they're your parents. They gotta love you. It's a rule. They make themselves pains in the neck because they love you. They embarrass you because they love you. They risk your anger, sometimes even your hatred, because they love you. For the most part we manage to survive, and we forgive them because we love them too. But even with all those clues, right out there in the open, we still don't know. We still don't get it.

Maybe we're not supposed to get it. Maybe it would upset some kind of natural balance. Or, maybe I project too much when I assume that my own dim-witted stroll through life is the same one that everyone else takes. But, I don't think so. I might concede, under duress, that women have a better shot at understanding all this a little sooner than men. Especially after

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