After 2+ months off, I’m on my last day of “leave.” Monday, I return to work, making Sunday a school night, which I can’t really wrap my mind around right now. As such, I’m kind of taking stock of and thinking over this experience, and really everything as whole since Maddie was born a little less than 5 months ago. Going in, the one thing I knew for sure was that I didn’t know much of anything, and that was 100% true; however, I can say that there is one aspect of all of this that has surprised me the most.

When women are pregnant they talk of their significant others having sympathy pains, some gain sympathy weight, but the basic idea is that often the man will share similar experiences to the woman despite no physical reasoning for it…or something like that. My question here is, is there such a thing as sympathy hormones? At times during pregnancy, and definitely postpartum, my wife dealt with some significant hormone shifts…as all pregnant women do. This is in no way a criticism or a setup to a punchline – these bad boys were no joke, and wreaked havoc on my wife’s emotional state. So where am I going with this?

In the weeks following Madison’s birth, I’ll be damned if all the sudden, out of the blue, my eyes would be welling up. I consider myself a fairly empathetic guy, but this was definitely not the standard. Lots of guys will have that one movie scene or something that might push them to the edge – lots of guys say the end of the movie “Rudy” whereas I’m more in the end of “Field of Dreams” camp – but this was different entirely. I mean, some of the things that cause this made sense, but a few of these were ridiculous…if not straight up embarrassing.

So on that note, I’ll give you a list of things that (almost) made me cry:

Songs. There have been a bunch of songs that have pushed me to the edge – most of which I’d heard dozens of times before with no effect at all, many of which have been included on posts I’ve made earlier for just this reason: “The Rainbow Connection” and “What a Wonderful World” are songs I’ve made mention of before, “Hallelujah” is another. It may have been a lyric, or just holding her in that moment, but there it was. Darius Rucker’s “It Won’t Be Like This For Long” is absolutely brutal.

These I can stand behind and feel that they’re at least respectable; some other instances are completely inexcusable. I now present to you the three most ridiculous things that made me choke up in the first few months after Madison was born:

The movie “Mother’s Day” – sometime a week or two after Maddie was born my wife and I were watching tv and she puts on this movie. I let it go because whatever, it was better than watching more Bravo. The movie wasn’t good, and one of the plot points is Jason Sudeikis raising his two daughters after his wife’s passing. At some point there’s some contrived emotional moment between the father and daughters. Shit.

An episode of “Friends” – in my first week home on leave with Maddie, I looked for something mindless to put on while I figured out what the hell I was doing. Oh, Friends, that’s simple, inoffensive entertainment that I don’t have to pay attention to. It ends up being the one where Ross’s son is born. He stands over the bassinet and talks to his newborn child about how he’ll always be there for him. Dammit.

And lastly, a Subaru commercial. Yes, a freaking car commercial. It was within the first couple days of bringing Maddie home, and it was somewhat late at night. The commercial comes on and it’s a dad cleaning out the car to give it to his daughter. As he cleans out the car, he finds various items and reminisces about the moments in her life all the way back to bringing her home from her hospital. It ends with his daughter, now grown, taking the keys and driving off. Oh come on, it’s a freaking car commercial.

By now you’ve probably established the theme shared by these ridiculous productions; I suppose I’ve always had a soft spot for this type of moment (see the end of Field of Dreams vs. the end of Rudy), but it’s remarkable the emotional impact and shift that happened there. I’m not quite so fragile as I was back there at the beginning, but I still do feel a definitive fundamental change internally. I’m sure it won’t be the last one.