The first time I heard his heartbeat, I lost all feeling in my legs. There he was, this fleshy, helpless thing – mine and alive. Once encased in amniotic fluid, once an image in the imaginations of myself and his mother, once abstract, the product of a faraway fantasy that meant a different kind of life – one that would be richer, more meaningful. The subject of so many connecting conversations, exchanges of intimacy and insight – the physical manifestation of our most primal fears and desires.

Our son was born three weeks ago. 8 pounds, 8 ounces—a perfect, healthy child. He cries and sleeps and eats and looks at the world with wide, wet eyes. I love him. And I fear him. I fear his hunger, his endless need, his desire without an object, without an end. His utter reliance on my wife and myself seems to me completely unfounded, unreasonable, and undeserved. As if he were to gain complete consciousness tomorrow and withdraw from our arms, disturbed at the thought of having ever depended upon two totally inept strangers.

Sophie and I were never certain about having children. Her mom died young, 38, when she was just 11 years old. It was sudden. When it happened, Sophie swore she would never have a family of her own. Her father raised her with all of the love and attention a single father of four could find within him, but he was completely destroyed, devastated all her life.

My own mother left when I was six, moved from New York to California to start a new life, away from my dad, my brother, and me. I have few memories of her. A glimpse of her smile sometimes surfaces, and I see something strained behind her eyes, between her teeth – a hesitancy to experience joy, a desperation for some kind of release – of what I still do not know.

The night Sophie and I met, we talked about our families, the traumatic conditions of our childhoods. Then we had sex without a condom. The next morning, Sophie told me she wasn’t on birth control and I felt my heart drop to my stomach. A week later, she got her period.

Many conversations about our future would follow. Over the course of four years, as we approached our late 30s, it became clear that our life together was so beautiful, so precious and so worthy of being shared, that we could only benefit from expanding it, by extending the purity of our love to a child.

Today our son is three weeks old. And for three whole weeks, since the moment I first put my ear to his chest to hear his heart beating, I have been haunted by its sound. I hear it in my car on my way to work, when I am totally alone and surrounded by nothing but other cars and trees. I hear it on walks with Sophie, quiet in the early morning, our son comfortably nestled on her chest. I hear it when he sleeps beside us in the bassinet, my eyes searching the ceiling for sleep.

In these few weeks, I have become totally debilitated by this sound – unable to concentrate on important tasks at work and distant in conversations with friends, wondering if I will be stuck forever, completely and utterly fixated on this evidence of life. This singular sound separating life from death.