A Father to a Son
On July 16th, 2009, I became a father to a son.
For some years, as a young boy, I had been a son to a father, but that had ended abruptly. Now I was thirty-nine years old and had a wife and a young daughter of my own. My wife was once again pregnant, and I was looking forward to a second child.
We had come to New York for the summer and were going to have the baby at a birthing center in Brooklyn. We stayed at our friends’ apartment in the East Village. It was a typical New York City summer; the air was hot, sticky, dirty, and alive with odors both pleasant and not. We spent our days waiting, walking around Tompkins Square Park, taking Sofia to play in the sprinklers. Soon, she was going to have a brother or a sister. A sibling to spend her childhood with.
My wife went into labor at seven that evening. Things moved along very quickly. We got in the car and sped across the Williamsburgh Bridge towards Coney Island, where the birthing center was. In the car my wife was working through all of the breathing techniques and meditations that we had learned together at our birthing class, but she was struggling to stay present. The labor was becoming more intense as I made my way through the busy evening traffic of Brooklyn. We arrived at the birthing center, a converted house, just as dusk fell. It was almost eight, and the birthing assistant, Olga, was not there yet. She was on her way, she had been at a dinner with friends. We sat in the car for five anxious minutes, until Olga finally arrived and quickly let us into the dark house. There were just the three of us in the building. I turned on a very dim bedside lamp and put on some music, and my wife lay down. We had been there for twelve minutes when the baby was born.
The baby lets out its first, thin, bleating cry. Olga lifts the impossibly tiny infant and lays it on its mother’s chest. I watch, suspended. Olga gently covers them both with a clean white sheet. My wife wraps her arms around the baby and puts her face tenderly against its delicate, writhing body. I am lying next to them, holding my wife close, and I see small tears roll off her cheek onto the side of the baby’s head, and then off onto the bedsheets. We lie like that for some minutes, a time with no real dimension. There is an overwhelming peace about this first union. My wife’s eyes are closed, but I know that she is not sleeping. My hand is on the baby’s back as it moves its limbs, making tiny noises as it seeks out its world. With my free hand, I slowly raise the white cotton sheet that is covering the baby and lift its hip a few degrees. I see a penis. I lower him down again, and notice that he has latched on to a nipple and is drinking hungrily. I lift my head and whisper to my wife,
“It’s a boy. We have a boy.”
I closed my eyes. A space opened in my chest and grew until it was cavernous, bottomless. The pendulum that had been swinging in one direction for most of my life had come to rest at the top of its arc and was now about to begin its return journey.
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