Our daughter came into this world screaming, a head full of black hair, 7 pounds 10 oz. My wife shaking, exhausted and gray from the spinal tap, the surgery, the stress and the emotions. I felt blessed to be my wife's husband, to be this child's father. I felt blessed to be alive and to have ever lived at all. All was pure amazement and I felt undone. Completely Undone.

The world came undone again Tuesday morning. I had just returned from the first of many trips to the hospital cafeteria, coffee in hand; ready to spend our first full day together as a family. On my way up the five floors in the elevator, I overheard people talking of an airplane crash, heads shaking, something was going on, there was a change in the feeling of the hospital…I passed the nurses desk, and found them surprisingly shaken, their incredible patience troubled. I turned on the local news and at first glance I thought a plane had crashed into an air control tower. Something awful but conceivable. When my eyes finally took in the image, and I recognized the building, I sat down in disbelief. My father in law does a lot of business at the World Trade Center. My wife called home to see if her father was all right. By the time she got through, both towers had fallen, the Pentagon was crumbling, and another jet had crashed in Pennsylvania. My father in law, our daughters grandfather, was in Miami on business, but several of his coworkers were not so fortunate.

The decision to bring a child into the world is one that is attended by a host of moral and ethical questions. There is the fear that one is not competent to take care of the child physical needs. There is a concern that one is not ready to be totally responsible to love, nurture and raise another human being, knowing that one has not yet mastered their own life, knowing that one is not in control of the world, and its vicissitudes. Then there is knowledge that our world, and indeed the very nature of our existence, is at times full of pain, and terrific hardship

Our daughter needed our love, caring, a diaper change, and a feeding, and besides, my wife had a secondary infection that got us sent into quarantine for a couple days, as one doctor feared it might be something worse. I slept on a hard chair for two nights in scrubs and nitrile gloves; Holding my child, and comforting my wife through an impermeable membrane. On Monday the 17th we left for home. It was a beautiful fall day, and my wife was gorgeous, and our child perfect.

Having spent the week of September 11th in a labor ward away from the wider world, taking in TV in small doses like a bitter but necessary medicine, I can say that it was an ideal place to have weathered one of the hardest weeks in our nation's history. People are always happy on a post-partum floor. Always exhausted, but happy. There is always a crowd of elated people smiling at the window of the nursery; grandparents, and siblings, cousins and friends. People of all walks of life. People of all color, and backgrounds, shaking hands, congratulating one another in earnest. All enraptured with the miracle of life, happy for one another's good fortune. This reaffirmed to me our common humanity, a realization that we all experience the same emotions, that life can indeed be wonderful, and that even in times of great sadness, hope and life goes on.

People can feel joy even through their pain. I felt America united there in front of that window watching the innocent and recent arrivals to our families and to our nation, but I have grown skeptical of the America United I've seen on T.V. since I returned home. I wonder if my daughter will need to receive a small pox vaccine in the upcoming months, along with polio, measles, mumps, and rubella, and if she will ask me about how the world was before September 11th, and I'm left wondering if it was fair to bring her into this unstable, manic, horrible, and magical life.