An excerpt from What Happened to Icarus: Encountering the Unfathomable in a World in Crisis (Wayfarer Books, March 2026)
“You’re gonna have to catch the baby!”
My wife’s voice was loud and strained, with a hint of panic. I continued to fumble with the showerhead. Moments before, when she’d realized she was in labor, she’d asked me to attach the hose to the showerhead in order to fill the birthing tub while we waited for the midwife. Our third daughter, Vismaya, whom we’d never expected, was a planned homebirth; but the plan was to have a midwife present.
I fumbled some more. There are things I am good at, things that don’t particularly faze me. Plumbing and anything that has to do with taking things apart and putting them back together are not on that list. I let out a sigh of relief. I much preferred to catch a baby than reconfigure the plumbing.
Ari’s voice was letting out sounds that had grown increasingly, desperately, primal as Cosima, now seven, came into the bathroom. We’d welcomed her participation in the birth, but she looked a little scared. It was the sounds her mother was making. “You don’t have to stay,” I said. She went back to her room, got under the covers, and waited for her sister to arrive.
I washed my hands. It seemed like the thing to do. Seemed medical.
“I don’t think I can do this!” my wife exclaimed, voice cracking just a bit. She must have been thinking some unarticulated version of this: The midwife isn’t here and I am left in the hands of a man who can’t unscrew a showerhead, who can’t even turn on the television without me. This is why women used to die in childbirth in the 1800s. And I did always joke that, without my wife, our home is like the 1800s, so limited are my technical capabilities.
But there was nothing technical, or even medical, about this birth. I looked her in the eye. “You can do this,” I said. “You’ve done this before.” Like this was what we’d been waiting to do since that day, so many years ago, on the porch: to give birth. Like this was the rhyme she’d been waiting to spit but couldn’t quite find the words until now.
She focused on pushing. I felt beneath where she squatted. Drops of blood fell over my hands, then more. Then the head. The head is the hardest part, the most painful part, as anyone knows who has given birth or witnessed a birth. It is the uniquely human part of the process; our big heads contain the minds that contain universes, from the cave paintings to Coltrane. We think we are different merely because our big heads make us smarter. But the human baby is born earlier, less developed, than it should be. Any longer a gestation period and the head would never get through. So we don’t get up running like zebras.
Those who have witnessed birth know this, too: The human baby is utterly dependent. Because of the abbreviated gestation, required by our big heads, we are biologically required to love our babies. We are only human because we can create community and care for one another. Our big heads can write symphonies; but they can also create nuclear bombs. Care is just as important as innovation.
The head came out, and along with it a deluge of liquids. I held the little body as it slid out into my arms, bloody and gasping for air. Like her parents. Like the whole world into which she’d come.
You’ve done this before.
My wife sat on the toilet and put the child to her breast. We cried at the bloody and awesome beauty. She was our beautiful, cosmic surprise. I had caught her, our unexpected third daughter.
This is how the universe works: We didn’t know that we’d have three daughters, but the world is unimaginable without each of them. There is a perfection in this, a thing to listen to in the world. Their days are spent in a maelstrom of creative energy, creating, imagining, making worlds. Three girls. This is something in itself to listen to.
When I close my eyes, I see those drops of blood on my hands, like the raindrops falling into my hands on the Mozambican beach. To live in this world is to have blood on your hands; to be alive is to have the courage not to turn away, because something is being birthed out of the bloody mess.
I caught her. Perhaps, one day, when I fall and fail in countless ways, she will catch me, too. For we spend so much of our lives trying to fly, trying to touch the sun. Trying to be like a god. But the real story always begins with a fall; the real story only begins with descent.
Theodore Richards is an educator, poet, and philosopher, and the founder of The Chicago Wisdom Project. His work is dedicated to re-imagining education and creating new narratives about our place in the world. He has received degrees from various institutions, including the University of Chicago and The California Institute of Integral Studies, but has learned just as much studying the martial art of Bagua; teaching in various settings and students; and as a traveler from the Far East to the Middle East, from southern Africa to the South Pacific. He is the author of eight books and numerous literary awards, including two Nautilus Book Awards and three Independent Publisher Awards. He lives on the south side of Chicago with his wife and three daughters.
I love this so much!