Nikolai Alexander was not sure he wanted to be a father. In fact, while in high school, he came up with all the reasons not to have children, though another side of him knew he wanted to have a family of his own. So in 2019 when he received that “I’m pregnant” message from his wife Tifany while he was at work, Alexander experienced a mix of excitement and fear over being a dad.

“I was at work and I got a message and I was like ‘What!?’ I was both freaked out and happy at the same time. In that I was thinking ‘I don’t have any idea of how to raise a kid, I don’t know how to do any of this, this is going to be really hard, I am a kid myself’ and then on top of that we had been trying to have a kid for a while and it wasn’t working so we said ‘okay cool, look like no children nah forward then” and right after we gave up she said she did a test because she missed a period,” Alexander recalled. He has described the moment he learned of his wife’s pregnancy with his son Zayn until now, more than four years later, as a “rollercoaster of simultaneous emotions” that flips between “Oh my God this is the best thing ever” and “oh my God this is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life”.

But for Alexander, there is nothing he would change about his situation. He told Observer Online that the weight of becoming a dad surprised him the most when his son was born in 2020. “The day he was born they put Tif through the ringer because they said t.