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Yesterday Larkin took a fall.

She's been walking for all of three weeks now, and on an open stretch of living-room hardwood she toppled forward, face first. Boom.

I was sitting with my morning paper and a cup of coffee. Molly swooped by and scooped Larkin up. There was that lengthy pause between impact and reaction, always a bad sign. Waaaaa! came the outrage at last.

"Is there blood?" I called out.

"Yeah," Molly said, and whisked Larkin upstairs.

From upstairs I could hear her wailing. I kept trying to gauge how bad it was. Go up there, I told myself. But I didn't go. Just sat there not reading my paper and not drinking my coffee, doing a stellar impersonation of uselessness.

Eventually they came down. Larkin had a fat lip and was probing it with her tongue. She was blinking away tears and looked, if anything, slightly curious about her injury.

"Was it bad?" I asked Molly.

"Lip cuts bleed," she said. "You wouldn't have wanted to be there."

You wouldn't have wanted to be there. A hint of reproach, but mostly just accurate knowledge of me, and what a wimp I am.

I'm not particularly squeamish about my own bodily hurts; I have a normal pain threshold. But when it comes to Larkin's pain, I don't just have a low threshold, I have no threshold. Her vaccinations, the blood test where they prick her finger and bleed it into the little capsule, even the challenge of putting eyedrops in her eyes as she screams away: subject her to some procedure that hurts her or scares her, and I lose my mind.

During a checkup last summer, our pediatrician spotted something in the back of Larkin's throat. It turned out to be a cyst above her tonsils -- a "soft-palate mass," in the ominous words of the ENT surgeon. We were advised to have it removed. That meant a CT scan, general anesthesia, surgery. She was four and a half months old. All too soon there she was, lying on a table in the radiology department of Hartford Hospital as a nurse tried to locate a vein to inject the IV dye for the scan. Babies have tiny veins, the nurse explained, and lots of fat obscuring them. She took a rubber strap and wrapped it tightly around Larkin's ankle. "Sometimes a foot is the best place," she said. She prodded and kneaded.

"Come on, honey," Molly said. "Show us a big vein like Mommy has."

"Lets try an arm," the nurse said, frowning. She removed the strap, tied it on Larkin's arm, and twisted.

And suddenly I couldn't take it. I asked Molly, Can you deal without me? She nodded, and I fled. Out in the hallway I writhed in self-reproach. Get back in that room, I told myself, be a responsible dad. But when I peeked in, there was Larkin, her face deep scarlet and screaming away, as Molly held her down and the nurse jabbed at her arm with a needle. Fifteen minutes later I steeled myself and went back again -- only to see a team of four now huddled over her, and a pile of bloody gauze alongside. I knew that if I stayed, I'd make a fool of myself. That's it, I'd shout, it's over, just give her to me! So again I fled. In the hallway I covered my ears to block the sound of my daughter screaming. I was in full ostrich mode, head deep in the sand.

For Larkin, thank God, it all worked out. They got a vein, finally. The scan was normal. Her surgery, a few weeks later, went swiftly and well -- the cyst was benign. She recuperated, and the whole episode began to line up for its future status as a "when-you-were-just-a-tiny-baby-and-we-were-so-scared" story. But I was left with a gaping wound to my ego. I was a pathetic father; a guy who cowers in the hall, leaving his wife to deal with the hard stuff. Where Molly was a rock, I was a 6' 2" tower of jello.

My woeful urge to flee brought to mind a time when I was 19 and working as a teaching intern at a summer school. One day when I had dorm duty, a girl put her arm through a window and was badly cut. I heard kids screaming for help, and as I raced down the hall it occurred to me that I was the help, I was the adult. I'd felt disbelief, then dread, tinged with resentment. Wasn't some "real" adult going to show up instead?

New parents feel this way a lot. When will the "real" parent, the all-knowing and unflappable authority, step in to take the place of this fraud, me?

You might think such insecurity would afflict mostly younger first-time parents, and not someone like me who, after all, has been out there for decades already, an adult behaving responsibly (well, more or less) in the world. But behaving responsibly is not the same as taking responsibility -- for another person. To the late-onset father, who has spent twenty-five years perfecting his independence, this responsibility is a cold dash of water in the face. I can deal with my own pain. Understand it, persevere through it; ignore it if I choose to. But Larkin's pain?

How to spare your child hurt? There it is, in a nutshell: the impossible, inevitable, desperate desire. I don't want Larkin to fall, bleed, weep, hurt. Ever. And apparently I'm hard-wired to break down if she is hurting and there's nothing I can do. What a typically male reaction: Don't give me a problem I can't do anything about! And yet being responsible for your child means dealing with all sorts of things you can't do anything about. That wail of outrage is just the first of a thousand hurts I am not going to be able to pre-empt.

Some people are by nature hungry for responsibility, but for most of us it's an acquired taste. You wouldn't have wanted to be there, Molly said. Well, I'm working on that. I'm trying to acquire the taste for hanging in there even when there is no solution. To feel Larkin's pain and simply be there with it, with her. And maybe turn the ostrich into a full-service dad.