It was snowing like crazy outside; my wife and I were halfway through our third winter aboard our 32-foot sailboat and I knew full well she would leave me before spending a fourth. I had a desk in the Mainely Media newsroom waiting for me, but I hadn’t written more than an itemized list since graduating college in 2005. Rumors about an economic recession were starting to swirl and I had heard about some guy named Obama on the radio. 

I made the call, and never would have guessed what the rest of the year had in store.

For six months, I nursed my reporting skills and began to enjoy the newfound security of late night council meetings. Then, my lower back – having hauled hundreds of mooring chains from the bottom of Portland harbor – decided I must have been finished with it. By July, I could only hobble through the newsroom and in August the doctors finally cut me up to fix the problem. 

A month and a half later, I walked – straight-backed – into a bank my wife and I convinced to help us buy a house. By mid October, funds from the sale of our sailboat enabled us buy an 80-year-old, two-story cape. A few weeks later I picked up our first dog and several weeks after that I watched – from my desk in the ever-evolving newsroom – as America elected that Obama guy president.

In the span of six months, I was transformed from a hearty, able-bodied sailor living off the grid with my first mate into a landlocked, lamed-up, home-owning family man. 

Now, at the beginning of 2009, I have nine months until I’m a father. 

Of all the resolutions on my list this year, (be better to my back, make early deadlines, have a good time at this summer’s regatta, fix the bathroom ceiling, get my motorcycle license) evolving into a dad has got to be the most daunting. I’m still getting over the fact I can’t shovel the driveway, go sailing when it reaches 30 degrees or leave our cat and dog alone for more than six hours at a time. A friend told me he didn’t begin warming up to his son until a month after he was born, and I’ve read that it can take longer than that for some fathers. 

The way I see it, I’ve got nine months to stop mourning the loss of that hearty sailor and start thinking about what my wife and I are calling the “sea monkey.”

Nine months. I can handle that.

                          –Nate Jones