Baby helps Dad realize just how precious life is.

Byline: Write on by Dan Carlin For The Register-Guard

I'M NOT REALLY a maternal kind of guy, which is why I needed to have a kid.

As a new first-time father, I'm going through some interesting changes. They are awesome enough for me to want to write about even though experienced parents may yawn at the obviousness of some of my observations while quietly muttering under their breath, "Just wait until they become teen-agers!"

Sure, there's diaper changing and late-night feedings and lots and lots of rocking. But the changes in me are more in the realm of how I think about birth and death and the meaning of it all. (I can almost hear my wife saying that my revelations had better be philosophical, because I'm not doing enough research if I'm writing about the diaper changing and late-night-feeding part!)

Also, my character is softening, which my soon-to-be-former friends say is a good thing. Too much baby talk coming out of the mouth of a grown, only sometimes shaven male has a way of doing that to a guy.

In a way, though, it's long overdue. We are, all of us, strong in some areas and weaker in others. Some people don't have to have children to balance out their character, but I think that I did. I hadn't been around little children since I was one myself. It wasn't by choice, I just wasn't in circumstances where kids were around.

Consequently, I wasn't as comfortable with them as I would have liked. I always wished that I knew better how to relate to their world and be interesting to them (and vice versa sometimes).

Well, having my own child created the interest on my part, and sheer necessity has given me the impetus to really find out what interests her.

At the moment it's a little stuffed toy sun that moves because Daddy is holding it like a puppet. I'm not the sort of person you can see playing the part of a baby-talking toy sun, which is why I'm really getting something out of doing it.

As I look at my little girl's early life experiences, these days that she will never remember and I will never forget, I am struck by how much of our own lives we miss. My earliest memories are probably of a moonshot when I was 3 or 4 years old. I'm only now becoming aware of how much was going on during all that time that never carved out a space in my adult memory banks.

I wish I could hit a recall button on the computer in my brain that would give me back those four or so years of memories of long-lost loved ones. I know I was there. We have the home movies.

It is this realization of the magnitude of the investment, emotional and otherwise, that I am making in this child that leads me to another of those uniquely parental experiences: the terrible worry involved.

I've created something that is so valuable to me that I don't know if I could go on if I lost it. There's a real vulnerability there, and it would be hard to fault a person for not having kids just to protect themselves from having something terrible happen.

To this day, I can't watch Bill Cosby without thinking of how much he must be hurting since his son was murdered. And it could happen to anyone's kid: a disease, an accident or a million other disasters.

Which leads me to one of my final revelations, one that should have always been obvious to me, but must not have been: the sheer value of human life.

The Greek historian Herodotus wrote that the Persian king Xerxes wept as he watched his enormous army crossing a bridge. When asked by a courtier why he wept, the king said he was lamenting that in a hundred years everyone in sight would be but a memory.

The post-child version of me looks at that story and thinks of all the rocking and late-night feedings and worry that went into all those soldiers, and the reality of the magnitude of the loss of even one of those people hits home.

I guess it took having a kid for me to realize it.

Dan Carlin is a former TV and radio journalist who lives in Creswell.

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