Seth Meyers’ Hilarious Birth Story Proves You’re Never Truly Ready For Parenthood
Seth Meyers shares the surprising experience of becoming a new dad
In the months leading up to the arrival of your first child, you do a lot of things to get ready. You read books, pick a doctor, tour hospitals, ready the nursery, install the car seat, and you usually approach your due date thinking you’ve got everything under control. Then labor happens and all hell breaks loose. No one knows that better than Seth Meyers, who just became a dad on Easter and recounted his wife’s crazy birth story last night during a hilarious Late Night monologue.
Meyers says his wife, Alexi Ashe, went into labor unexpectedly on Easter Sunday. It was two weeks before her due date, and he was so surprised he didn’t even realize what was happening at first. “Basically, around 11:30 or 12, my wife about every 10 or 12 minutes would say her back hurt, and I would go, you know, rub her back,” Meyers recalled. “And I’m bad at recognizing patterns, or else I would have known that those were contractions.”
Eventually the pair figured out what was going on and called the doctor. As they were getting ready to leave for the hospital, Alexi’s water broke, which Seth describes with a look of horror as sounding “exactly like what water would sound like if it broke; it’s incredibly well named.” The pair took an Uber car to the hospital, and Meyers says he rolled down the window so his nauseated, struggling wife could scream, “I don’t like this!” He adds, “Only in New York could you drive that way and not have people say, ‘That woman has been abducted.'”
Eventually they made it to the hospital, where Alexi delivered a healthy baby boy named Ashe Olsen to a hospital staff decked out in bunny ears for the Easter holiday. Meyers teared up talking about naming his son, and then tried to describe the overwhelming feeling of being a new parent. “I realize every parent whose watching this has had this moment…,” he said. “But the weirdest thing is you’re just not a parent, and then you are. It takes your brain a couple hours to catch up to that.”
What Meyers and his wife learned, and what we all learn, is that there’s absolutely no way to ever truly prepare to become a parent. Everything from labor to birth to how you’ll feel in the hours following delivery is completely unexpected, and it’s a wild ride from start to finish.
When I was young, I used to imagine there’d come a time when I’d just feel like an adult, like the head of a household, like an official mom. I still don’t. I probably never will. Becoming a parent is just a mind-bending, emotional journey that never, ever becomes more predictable. The one thing that keeps us going — the one thing we all share — is overwhelming joy and love at the mere existence of our kids. Meyers and his wife clearly have that, and it’s adorable to hear him recount his wife’s birth story with such excitement.
You’re never really “ready” to become a parent, but the experience is one you wouldn’t want to miss. Welcome to the club, Seth and Alexi.
