The New Dad Gift Nobody Thinks to Give

When my friend Seth had his first kid, everyone gave things to the baby.

Which makes sense. The baby needed things. The baby needed a lot of things. There were onesies and swaddles and little noise machines and a truly impressive number of items designed to hold a baby in various positions. The baby was covered.

Seth was not covered.

I noticed this because I had watched him over the previous nine months go from a person with a full identity to a person whose identity was quietly reorganizing itself around something enormous and terrifying that had not happened yet. He was excited. He was also visibly losing sleep before the baby had even arrived. He had stopped talking about things he used to talk about. His own interests, his projects, the dumb jokes he usually made. He was disappearing into the role before he even had a chance to figure out how to wear it.

I thought about what he actually needed.

Not for the baby. For him.

I got him a really good coffee setup. Not a machine, a pour-over kit with a gooseneck kettle and a small bag of the best coffee I could find. The kind of coffee that requires thirty seconds of actual attention and makes something that tastes like a person made it. I included a note that said: this is yours. Not the baby's. Yours. For the five minutes in the morning that are still just you.

He texted me two weeks after the baby was born. It was three in the morning his time. He said: I am making the coffee right now and it is the only thing keeping me human.

That is the gift. Not the coffee. The five minutes. The tiny act of being a person with preferences. Sometimes that is the most useful thing you can give someone who has just had their whole life rerouted.