I have lost count of the number of times my heart has skipped a beat since she was born. It skipped a beat when her mother bled, when she lay in bed all day because in truth there is no cure for a baby that will not stay.
It skipped a beat when her waters broke, and I leapt out of bed before I was fully awake, for that cry of anticipation – of the woman who got up in the middle of the night to pee and found herself standing in a pool of amniotic fluid – bypasses the brain.
It skipped a beat each time the midwife came to listen for her’s, when I held my breath unknowing, breathing again only after I’d heard her's.
It skipped a beat when they pulled her out, when her mother turned to ask me, ‘Where is my baby? Why can I not hear her crying?’ And I was looking at the door, the same one they had rushed through, three mid wives and a silent baby.
I tell you, these are the origins of Love at its most primeval, that silence between two people that begs God to break it with the delicate wailing of a newborn. That is the only way I can explain it, this…chasm that opens up within me some times, when she looks up at me. I have tried to find the bottom of these depths. What will I not do for you? What? I have not found the bottom of these depths.
So, I have looked away sometimes because this too will be difficult, explaining to a child why one who has not been spanked, or had his ears pulled, will suddenly sprout tear-filled eyes? For this lesson, of how love is a man’s strength and a man’s weakness, is a difficult one to teach, how the thought of things that have not happened and may never happen – like losing you in a crowded shopping mall, like thinking of you crying and calling my name, or imagining the day when you will have to learn to live without me, like having someone snatch you away through an open window or from an empty sidewalk and having to live with the knowledge that you are out there somewhere, maybe hurt, maybe in pain, and I cannot be there to fulfil the destiny of a father, to throw my life down so yours can spring forth – can wake me up in the middle of the night hyper-ventilating.
I love you. Do we not say this to each other, playfully, me trying to teach you how to mouth the alphabets of emotion, even though understanding – true understanding – will be many years in the future? But I walk these paths, the same ones my father and mother walked before me, I sit up in the same night, creep down the same hallway to quietly open the door to your room, to look in, to listen, to listen until I hear the reassuring sound of my child breathing; and I worry – the same worry – at the storm brewing outside your window, at the chaos of a society that will not build itself, at these loose bricks crashing down from the ceilings of a crumbling state, threatening to crush my only reason left to hope still. And I determine – feeling the sinews of my soul tense in the most total willingness I know I will ever experience in this life to embrace battle with its consequences, whatever they may be – that you will have a better life…
Yes. I am your father.
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