I’m 70 days from the 70th anniversary of my arrival.

As I reach the milestone, the thing that strikes me is how much different life is now. Of course, things are going to change over the course of any 70-year span. But it’s still wondrous – things and concepts we accepted as never-ending end, and things and concepts we never imagined show up.

So in the 70 days leading up to my birthday, I’m going to offer some thoughts on this idea: What things would have shocked my parents, sitting in a room at Flushing Hospital after my birth, about the world in which their soon-to-be septuagenerian son lives.

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Let’s not leave the guiding image of this endeavor: a multibed hospital room on an upper floor of Flushing Hospital. It’s an April afternoon and my parents are sitting there with who would turn out to be the first of their four children.

My mother has seen me since Dr. Joseph Micelotta of Corona held me up to her moments after my birth.

My father, on the other hand, was not in the room. He didn’t see me until well after I had been examined, cleaned up and dressed (in a blanket) for the first time.

In 1954, that was the norm. Fathers didn’t attend the birth of their children. They were either in a waiting room, pacing as they awaited news about their growing family, or off the premises all together, awaiting a phone call to tell them to come on over and see their son or daughter.

Sometime between 1954 and 1991, when my daughter was born, the norm changed.

Women, pretty much alone in the final hours of the worst pain humans normally endure, began pushing to have their spouses or other partners in the delivery room. They wanted to either share the experience with someone they loved or, in some cases I’ve heard, curse out the guy responsible for the suffering.

Men wanted to support their partners. The way I looked at it, the one – soon to be two – I loved most in the world were in pain and peril. And even though I wasn’t sure what I could possibly do to help, I wanted to be there to try.

I took the Lamaze classes with the intensity of studying for a final exam in college. We practiced at home. And then, when I was in the room, I held my wife as she kicked against an elderly nurse in a final successful effort to push out the baby and avoid a C-section to get her.

I saw our daughter the second she arrived. I held her with my wife within a minute. I choked up as I realized how much someone must love me to endure what she did to produce our baby.

The next day, my father and mother came up to see the baby. At dinner, I told him how wonderful it was to be in the delivery room. He had a hard time grasping it, saying he could never do it and flinching as if I had wanted him to see something gross.

I said to him that it was surprising he felt that way. He was so protective of the people he loved, I would think he’d want to do what he could for them at such a critical moment.

For the most part, things have changed for the better since 1954. That’s definitely true in this case. Not only can fathers watch their children be born, but so can women who are married to the childbearer, or any partner mutually involved in the baby’s life. 

Not that it changes the feeling. In my office is a note my father wrote to my mother to go with the flowers he gave her when he came to the hospital: “I am a lucky man today. Because I have a wife like you and a baby boy.”