Fatherhood is a psychedelic experience – Mr. Market

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Fatherhood is a psychedelic experience

01 Jul, 2026

My wife gave birth on June 24, 2026. Before she gave birth, I would describe myself as helplessly ambitious, obsessed with abstract, inconsequential cognitive games (debating ideas with friends and reading/writing nonfiction and autobiographical poetry), and calmly hedonistic.

I’m using hedonism here literally, to mean ‘avoiding suffering and optimizing pleasure’. I wasn’t partying or having crazy carnal experiences or anything. But I was spending a lot of time on my phone looking at stupid things for no reason, playing videogames half-assedly while half-watching something on TV, checking my blog analytics constantly for validation, etc. These were all attempts to avoid boredom, thinking about my life, or being truly present in a world I found both intolerably uneventful and out of control.

After the birth of my son Frank (not his real name - rather, what I wanted to name him; I was overruled by my wife who I strongly believe deserved final say), I’m feeling/behaving quite differently. I have a feeling the psychedelic effects of this experience will fade over time, but thousands of tiny particles of it will be forever diffused within my experience of life, like a drop of red food coloring in a bottle of water.

To explain what has changed and why it’s changed, I have to tell you what happened. Telling you won’t come close to accurately conveying the potency of the experience, but words are what I have. It’ll be a bit like trying to build the concept of time out of Legos. But here goes.

Apart from the nurses and doctors and midwives, who were variously in and out based on what needed to be done at a particular time, there were three people in the delivery room: me, my wife, and my wife’s best friend Tessa.

Tessa had recently given birth to a little boy about 6 months earlier. She’s known my wife since early in college, where they met in French class. Neither Tessa nor my wife has a sister, and they’ve functionally taken on that role for each other.

Tessa showed up with the gear she needed to pump (her son is still breastfeeding), a Coke for me, and a stuffed animal for my wife. The stuffed animal was a Squishmallow you can turn inside out to reveal a second, thematically related character. The one Tessa got was anthropormorphic popcorn, which you could flip inside out to reveal a can of soda.

My wife Peyton was lying on the hospital bed, eyes closed, breathing slowly and with great intention. She was trying to separate herself from an intolerable pain.

“Are you popcorn,” said Tessa, holding the stuffed animal up, “Explosive? Excited? Bursting forth? Or are you soda.” She flipped it. “Internal? Contained? Showing restraint, but with a clear potential for intensity?”

“Soda,” my wife said, eyes still closed.

“Popcorn,” I said.<br>“Popcorn,” Tessa said.

Tessa put music on the JBL speaker my wife had packed in our hospital bag. She was charged with curating the emotional environment of the experience. She put on “Night Moves” by Bob Seger.

Over hours, my wife suffered through contractions with no pain medication. The nurse told us the anesthesiologist was in surgery each time we’d ask about the epidural. Finally, he came to our room. He looked like Peter Parker. He started unfurling and sterilizing various pieces of equipment on a metal tray.

My wife sat at the edge of the bed, hands on her knees, concentrated on not moving.

“I am the stillest woman in the universe,” she said.

After the epidural, she became considerably more animated and interactive. While pushing, she sang along to whatever played on the speaker, grinning. The three of us would make jokes, delirious with exhaustion and optimism.

Around 2 am, sitting on a stool with a cup of black coffee, I looked around the room and tried to ‘catalogue’ the moment in a permanent way. I wanted to remember everything: The wide arc of yellow lamplight thrown across the wall opposite me, the tinny smell of coffee in a paper cup late late at night, the midwife’s relaxed, reassuring competence, Tessa slouched in the recliner with her arms crossed staring straight into the brutality of the my son fighting his way into the world.

Benny and the Jets was on. The nurse was typing things on the monitor and swiveling it towards the midwife. The midwife was instructing Peyton to push, then suggesting she change position. The midwife affixed a tall, horizontal bar to the sides of the bed. Peyton pulled herself into an upright, seated position, now presiding high above the busy courtroom of us onlookers.

“The King’s throne,” Tessa said.

Fifteen minutes later, the doctor came into the room.

“He’s stressed out,” she said. The baby’s heart rate often plunged after a contraction. “We gotta get him out. If you’re comfortable, we’ll use the vacuum and do a couple more pushes. If it doesn’t work, we’ll have to do a C section.”

The doctor called in...