Last night, while my wife ate dinner and watched the hockey game, I took Sam to bed and finished our nightly ritual: I gave her a kiss, lied down in the bed my wife and I share, and snuggled my daughter and her stuffed cow ("Shakes") until Sam had fallen asleep. My wife, once she had finished dinner, came in and put Sam in her crib, so I could have my own dinner.
We do this every night. This ritual follows so many others we have that begin around six every evening. No matter the day, our time together as a family starts at about six every night. By then, after work and/or day care we have come together as a family, and we either are on our way home or have just arrived at home. If needed, Sam has a final "big" bottle and then we play for a while, then she gets changed into her nighttime sleeper. Twice a week she takes a bath, which she loves because she can go "splashy-splashy" with her ducky and bath-cow.
Usually I have either fixed dinner, or I'm feeding Sam her final bottle while my wife reheats her dinner. Generally I snuggle Sam to sleep so my wife can shower and get ready for the next day, and then she puts Sam in the crib. (In case you're wondering, the height of the crib is screwy for me, and it's easier for my shorter wife to get Sam into the crib without waking her.)
What makes this routine less than routine (well, except for the traffic here in the DC area) is Sam herself. I love watching her learn something new. I love holding her (yes, even when she's fighting me when she doesn't want to go to sleep). I love hearing her giggle when she discovers that she can make Mommy and Daddy laugh just by doing something herself. Life for myself outside of being her daddy now sucks, thanks to the economy, but she has no idea about that. She just knows that my wife is her Mommy, and I am her Daddy.
There was a brief time, and all children go through this, when she didn't want to be held by me, even when my wife was in the room. She only wanted Mommy. While that didn't hurt me, it did make me wonder about how long it would take to pass. It didn't take long. Now Sam comes to me as much as her Mommy. She gives me that goofy, toothy grin just as often. She looks for me if she can't see me when we go out together as a family. I am a part of her (thus far) short life. I am her Daddy, not just her Father.
And that amazes me.
I've spoken of my own father. He stopped being a part of my life twenty-five years ago despite my attempts to the contrary. He stopped being active in my life long before that. He may have helped biologically bring me into the world, yes, but his active role in my upbringing and his effect on my moral compass is virtually nil. I learned more from his inactivity as my father than I ever did from his participation in my life. In fact, I learned more from comic books and films than I ever did from him.
His desire to focus more on a financial bottom line and another family than me and my mom has led him to be, from what I understand from others, Borg-like: single-minded and soul-less, with no sense of what I now have enjoyed for nearly a year.
The pure joy of being a Daddy... Sam's Daddy.
While it is far too early - years too early - to celebrate or honor my effectiveness as a father this day, I will take a small bit of ego time today and celebrate. I will celebrate not my being a father, but this beautiful gift of life and joy. I will celebrate my daughter, and the joy I have come to love in being her Daddy.
Warning: Parental Advisory (From August 31, 2005)
Literally.
Several people told me prior to July 10 that one of the more amazing experiences in my life would be witnessing the actual birth process. Not so much.
First, not having a uterus kind of gets me off the hook for much of the work. Let’s be honest: men get the fun part of the job, wait nine or so months, and then get to pass out cigars. Women get to feel the joy of having life grow inside of them, slowly and magically, until that wondrous moment when they suddenly have to pass a frozen turkey through a drinking straw.
I’m actually amazed that most of the babies in this country have as their first words not “mama” or “dada,” but “epidural.” Some women get to miss this painful pleasure entirely, instead experiencing the joys and rapture of anesthesia and fairly major surgery in the form of a cesarean section.
My wife and I opted for a C-section when early scans showed our little girl to be tracking much larger than the average baby. Since my wife was concerned about giving birth to such a large baby, I was going to allow her to make the ultimate decision. Again, I have no uterus, so it was not my decision to make. I just wanted my little girl delivered safely. (FedEx is missing opportunities here, I think.)
One note for those of you that do not know my wife: I am 6’6” – she’s 5’1.” I was born at some 24 inches long and roughly 10 pounds. That was all my wife could think of in the last trimester as birthing options were discussed. Actually, it was her looking at my shoulders (which are exceedingly broad) and shaking her head "no way!" I digress.
My daughter had done well when we went to see Star Wars III in May, so we hoped that my wife could weather The Fantastic Four, which we saw on the morning of July 9. Not so much. Sam was quite active during the film, which I joked afterwards as her simply being ticked off that she couldn’t see it. After all, surely she knew that her daddy had grown up enjoying the comics and was excited about the film, so why couldn’t she share in that?
We then went home instead of going to the ice cream parlor, and my wife tried to relax. Her system was not doing well in general, and she was in some pain. Later in the evening, she realized, out loud, “I wonder if these are contractions?”
My inner monologue replied, "oh, shit!"
My outer monologue was far more calm and supportive: "oh, shit."
We started counting once we figured out how. After all, we were a week away, and had only basically discussed the counting of contractions. In fact, just the other day we had scheduled our daughter’s cesarean for the 14th of July – Bastille Day. My wife’s contractions were somewhat strange. Seventeen Minutes... One hour and twenty minutes... Eight minutes...
We decided that we should keep an eye on things and go to bed. (Side note: who came up with that colloquialism? It’s impossible to keep your eyes on things while you are asleep!)
At about five in the morning, my wife woke me up. “I think it’s time – this one’s been over four hours.”
I should tell you that just the week previous we had our first – and last – false alarm. Luckily, my brother and his wife were there to show support. This time, it was just us.
Hoo-boy.
Again, my outer monologue picked up the support slack: "oh, shit."
We gathered up the bags, pillows and a couple of teddy bears (one for baby, one for daddy) and headed to the hospital.
Well, Sam apparently didn’t like the idea of us telling her when she was to come out, but she could have picked a slightly better day. When we got to the hospital, the birthing unit was packed. In fact, it was so busy that we were placed in a holding room, and they had to improvise everything for my wife.
We were lucky, however, that my wife’s regular OBGYN and not the substitute was available. We were also lucky that my brother and his wife and my Mom could make it up quickly.
The rest is sort of surreal in terms of timeframe.
With a C-section, you basically have to just wait for the birthing OR to open up. That didn’t take too long once the OBGYN showed up. They found me scrubs big enough for my god-like frame (the god in question being Buddha), and shuffled me off to a waiting room.
It was quite possibly the longest fifteen minutes of my life, made worse because the pants were too big and they kept falling down around my ankles.
I should warn you now: the squeamish may not want to continue. (Believe me, I'm one of them. I don’t watch medical shows unless they focus on less visual stuff, like House.)
When I got to the OR, my wife was on a gimble, an operating table on a sort of joint-like setup that allows the nurse to rotate and angle the patient in nearly any direction and angle required by the doctor. However, this also causes disturbance for the patient, especially one that has just been given a spinal injection and is now having her innards moved about.
I sat down next to my wife’s head and immediately smelled copper.
For those of you that don’t know, one of my migraine-related quirks is a super-heightened sense of smell when I have a migraine. I did that morning, and I could smell everything in the OR acutely, especially the contents of my wife’s torso. So, I focused on the anesthesiologist’s shoes. She was nice, too, chatting at me and letting us know what was going on, since the wuss husband was pretty much useless.
However, I am a curious sort. Well, remember what happened to the cat?
I happened to look at just the wrong moment, so much so that I have yet to be able to eat spaghetti with tomato sauce. I’m sure you can understand why. If not, my wife and I have a new saying in the house: “entrails! Entrails!”
Ew.
(A note to surgeons performing C-Sections when husbands are present: it probably is not a good idea to grab a handful of the woman’s intestines and lift them out of the torso to “have a look around.”)
Despite the “ew,” the surgery went well, my wife did not throw up, and after a couple of issues, Sam was removed safely.
Issues? Well… If you are a woman, you will understand what this stuff means, and if you are a man, find out. Despite actually being in hard labor, there was NO effacement in my wife’s system. This is the way in which the woman’s system thins out the muscles and tissues around the womb and uterus to ensure a smoother birth. This is significant for a C-Section too because it means that there was far more work to do.
As the OBGYN put it, a normal C-Section is like cutting through a very thin scalopine. Because there was no effacement, my wife’s operation was like cutting through a double think T-Bone. The other issue was that the umbilical cord was tied around Sam’s head, and had she been born naturally, that could have caused problems. So, even though she wasn’t as big as we had thought, we were lucky to have had her via cesarean.
Except that I do miss the FLAVOR of good spaghetti and tomato sauce.
Despite all of the OR squeamishness, and the problems that came up, I have to say it was pretty amazing. Not so much the surgery itself, or the overall process, but just the aftermath.
Sitting there, in borrowed scrubs, brushing hair from my wife’s forehead while a doctor extracts our child from her midsection, waiting cautiously for that first cry.
That first sign of life.
That first moment – that first realization – that my wife and I... My partner and I – have just made our lives that much more wonderful.
For all the crap we go through at work, and for all the crap we have to deal with outside of our “haven,” we now have this beautiful creature that we made to share the journey.
We will care for this little girl, we will teach her everything she needs to survive, and when it is time, let her out into the world.
Will we want to? No.
Will we have to? Yeah.
My mother showed enough faith in me when I was 10 to let me out and about, and it will be up to me to be as good a parent to Sam as my mom was to me.
When the nurse brought me that beautiful little creature, all bundled up in a blanket, her eyes smeared with antiseptic goo, all I could think of was...
"I believe she looks like Chief O’Brien."
Okay – that may not have actually been what I was thinking, but it is what I said. It’s a line from one of my wife’s favorite Star Trek: the Next Generation episodes, "Disaster," when Worf delivers Chief O’Brien’s baby in the lounge when the ship is incapacitated.
No, this time it was my inner monologue that had the floor: "wow."
I was now charged, with my wife, with the care and well being of another human being, and I was notorious for killing mint, an herb known for being truly hard to screw up.
And yet, I was amazed... Scared... Proud... Ecstatic.
Not only was I going on one hell of an adventure, but I had a beautiful woman to join me, and we now had a beautiful little girl to raise, teach, and introduce the whole amazing world to. I do hope the world is worth the trouble, because I know for a fact that my daughter certainly is.
The really amazing thing is that I used to doubt ever wanting a child.
Coming soon, a recap of the past few week's happenings while we've dealt with illness, work, and other things. Coming in July: the Best of Sammy as the wee Angel turns ONE!
