Tomorrow my oldest son will turn 18. My wife won't shed any tears remembering her relatively brief time in labor with her firstborn. As these things go, Jeremy's birth went smoothly from my vantage point as the expectant father.

Thank God for midwives and the special birthing pool they maneuvered my wife into. All I had to do was hold her hand and tell her to push when prompted by experts.

Everybody warned me that she might become verbally abusive because of the pain she was experiencing, but she couldn't have been sweeter.

I called her "Funny Face" to lighten the mood. She called me "Evilness" or something equally endearing, but strange. That's been my nickname ever since, though I'm not sure what it means.

When Jeremy's head crowned, Sting's cover of Jimi Hendrix's "Little Wing" was playing on the room's portable boombox. It was part of my wife's repertoire of mood music designed to get her through the evening. My first view of my firstborn was startling. Jeremy looked vaguely amphibian because his seven-pound-something-ounce body was squirming and wiggling underwater.

Thoroughly immersed in the pool's warm water mixed with his mother's blood, Jeremy was the most beautiful and enigmatic creature I had ever laid eyes on.

Even as I cut the umbilical cord, he looked more like an alien from another dimension than either one of us, his parents.

When he finally entered the realm of air breathers with a burp and a cry, the midwife lifted him into my wife's exhausted arms.

"Hi there," she said between bouts of laughter as tears streamed down her face. "Hi there, little Jeremy" she cooed while staring into her son's face still temporarily pinched from the effort of breathing outside the womb.

As much as I love my firstborn, my wife's love for him is even more unconditional and all-encompassing.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that he had the courtesy not to inflict her with Caesarean scars when he emerged from the womb. For that matter, neither did his twin brothers, born less than two years later.

The hormones generated by Jeremy's nine-month occupation of her body permanently cleared up her complexion, making her especially luminous in her final months of pregnancy.

Even when they fight, they make a point of burying the hatchet quickly. Meanwhile, I can expect a cold shoulder for days for saying something far less inflammatory than "Leave me alone, Mom and go away!"

My wife is never as angry with me as she is when she's convinced I've unfairly picked on her "little Jeremu," as she calls him.

Other than the back talk all teenagers engage in to assert their "autonomy," Jeremy has yet to cause either one of us a moment of embarrassment or shame -- with the possible exception of the time he knocked out one of his brother's front teeth with an expertly thrown shoe.

Granted, Jeremy is as frustrating, mysterious and difficult to understand as any teenager, but his fundamental decency is never in doubt.

Still, I'm not crazy about his choice of music. Despite the fact that I probably have a bigger and more diverse CD and vinyl collection than anyone he knows, Jeremy mostly subsists on a diet of one-dimensional hip-hop. He expressed a faint curiosity in jazz a few years ago, but dropped it.

Having said that, Jeremy is far from being a gangsta wannabe. His pants cover his butt crack most of the time. Other than parking tickets, he's never had trouble with the law.

We're grateful that he's more than up to the academic challenges of high school. He gets better grades than I did at his age, though not better than his mom. Among his many accomplishments is his successful tenure as the captain of his high school soccer team. He is fielding offers from great colleges while displaying an admirable amount of poise.

The "cool kids" orbiting Jeremy would have shunned his old man three decades ago. To my amazement, he was ducking girls at 15 who would have caused me to weep with joy had they merely acknowledged my existence when I was his age.

Jeremy is now a day away from being able to enlist in the military without our permission if he chose to do so, though that isn't likely. By the arbitrary traditions of our republic, he'll be able to vote this spring, but he won't be fully vested in adulthood until he turns 21.

Still, when I look at my firstborn son, I don't see the vaguely amphibious alien baby I held in my arms 18 years ago. Instead, I see a remarkable young man who makes me prouder than I can ever say.