Well, come over here and meet your new son!”

When I watched him being born some 14 years ago, I stood paralyzed in the delivery room. My legs felt like they were anchored in quicksand when the nurse placed my little boy on the heating table and spoke these words to me.

I walked toward him while he cried air into his lungs. I took my index finger and placed it inside his little right hand. He squeezed it and suddenly he stopped crying. I knew then that this first time father and his beautiful son would bond together forever.

Two years later, while her mother lay in bed with a postpartum headache, my newborn daughter spent her first two nights at home sleeping on my chest. Again I felt paralyzed to move but this time in fear of her falling off me to the floor. I don’t remember closing my eyes during those nights. I was too much in awe of my little Guppy, a nickname I still call her today.

An intuition of my fatherhood is I can feel what my children feel. When Richie was 3 and after he fell face first on to the tile floor in our home, I rushed him to the emergency center. The doctor told me to hold my son still on the table while he got five stitches to close the wound in his head.

My son cried. I cried. We were both scared.

For my daughter’s fifth birthday party, I had hired a Cinderella to come to our home in Jim Thorpe to surprise her. Believe me when I tell you that it was not easy to find a Cinderella anywhere in the Pocono Mountains, but I managed to locate one somewhere near East Stroudsburg.

When the Disney doll stepped onto the bottom of our driveway in her glass slippers, I watched Guppy’s eyes open wide and her jaw drop. Mine did too. She ran down to meet the lovely lady adorned in her long white gown. I felt my legs running along with Guppy as I watched from the front porch.

Whenever my son strikes out in a baseball game, I strike out with him. He gets a hit, I feel myself running to first base with him though I’ve not moved from behind the fence.

When I took the training wheels off Guppy’s bike, I held the handlebars while she pedaled around our neighbor’s driveway. When I finally let go and she rode away by herself out to the street, I couldn’t help but feel that someday I would release her again, but then it will be into the arms of the man she will marry.

Business executive Naveen Jain echoed my sentiments when he said, “Being a father has been, without a doubt, my greatest source of achievement, pride and inspiration. Fatherhood has taught me about unconditional love, reinforced the importance of giving back and taught me how to be a better person.”

The website, “The Unbounded Spirit” explains unconditional love further. “Respond to your children in their worst moments, their angry moments, their frustrated moments, their inconvenient moments because it is in their most unlovable human moments that they most need to feel loved.”

Some time ago, I knew a man who was the father of two little boys who were constantly fighting each other prompting him to say, “I love my kids, but I don’t like them.”

As dads, we have those moments when we get tired of parenting and wonder why we ever wanted children. Then if we just wait a moment or two, we’re reminded why. When my daughter says to me, “I love you more” or my son says, “Thanks, Dad” when I cook his favorite dinner, I realize I’m doing a pretty good job nurturing them toward adulthood.

What gives me peace of mind is thinking of the legacy I’ll leave my kids. Mitch Albom in his book, “The Five People You Meet in Heaven” explains the circle of life we share with them and he reminds us that we, as mothers and fathers, don’t own our children, we only rent them for a while.

“Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away. The moments that used to define them — a mother’s approval, a father’s nod — are covered by moments of their own accomplishments. It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives.”

I will think of my dad on Father’s Day, not the man who couldn’t be there for me because of a sickness that stole his life, but I will idealize him through the pictures and the stories of his healthy youth. I’ve imagined a memory of my father to feel grateful to him for giving me life and for the chance to grow and become the best father I can be to my kids.

Every time my son and daughter call me “Dad,” my soul smiles and I realize once again what a blessing and miracle it is for me to be given the gift of fatherhood.

Rich Strack can be reached at katehep11@gmail.com.