“…parenthood is not an exact science, but a vexed privilege and a blessed trial, absolutely necessary and not altogether possible.” —Wendell Berry
She cries. I cry, but not for the same reasons. “You want to hold her?” they ask. Do I want to hold my baby girl! I reach her away and it takes me five seconds because everybody is so slow. She falls asleep in my arms as if she is used to it. As if I was used to it.
I’ve seen a double handful of nieces and nephews as newborns, and they all looked the same. The most theatrical thing they could do was stretch and yawn, which was cute and all that, but not something I would buy a ticket for. But this newborn is different. This one has fingernails and toenails and eyelashes. My God what have you given me! I cannot pronounce her name, two simple syllables, Rae-lyn, without bursting into tears, and it is two days before I can say it without a restriction in my throat.
You have a father. I can safely infer as much. Until recently, I looked at you as a free moral agent in control of your destiny, as a unit detached and out and about in the world. Now I watch you obliquely, as though watching you in a mirror, and sympathize with your father, because he’s a man who has a stake in who you’ve become. Sometimes I envy your father because you’ve turned out to be such a fine adult. Sometimes I pity him.
I’m a father too, now, and am not too sure about it. I’ve seen this epiphany on the faces of other newly minted fathers; it was obvious even to the uninitiated. They come into their first public gathering, proud, but a bit unsure, as though they weren’t sure what to do with their hands. Their first public meditations postpartum take on the themes of fatherhood and sonship. I saw this coming and braced for it, but one can’t brace for this kind of emotional surge any more than one can brace himself for a tsunami.
Dad. It’s a title I’d have chosen, but it’s mostly out of anybody’s control in one wild miracle of biology. Here’s the mathematical probability of this unique DNA: 1 in 200,000. And then from that exchange and binding of proteins, there comes a complex individual who will be shaped by, what? Circumstances. Parents. Friends. Books. Experience. As to possibilities of how or what my daughter could be, we are fast approaching infinity. It is no wonder that something goes wrong from time to time: It is a wonder that anything ever goes right.
And yet, in this intricate and extensive chain, there arrives a fully formed soul into our world. It is a study in humility to witness the unfolding of this miracle. Babies are born every day, 385,000 times some say, but when it happens to you it’s the only one born in the world that day.
It’s a title you can’t slip, even if you wanted. It’s not like writing, where you can write for years and deny the pretentious title of “writer.” You’re a father. The proof is written into another human’s DNA. But the state of being a father, all arguments aside, doesn’t make you good at it. You walk into church and realize that either all the other fathers have been faking it or you are an imposter, a dilettante among experts, a rookie among hall-of-famers. You’re a father, the condition is irreversible. You had better get something figured out.
And then she will grow up, and that’s the problem too. My father-in-law allowed his daughter to be carried off by a second-rate individual, and there may come a day when I need to trust my daughter’s judgement over my own. The thought makes me reach down the bottle of Tums for my stomach.
Only by birth can we have death, and only by being young can we have the old. She will pass through these stages as I will, as we all do. Now, she is at our mercy and cannot do even the slightest task in taking care of herself. We like this work of taking care of her, as tiring as it can be, and it satisfies us. One day, however, she will be an adult and not need our assistance, and then I will age a little more and maybe I will be as helpless in my old age as she once was and we will have come full circle. Just a little piece of trivia for us to think about.
This love fatherhood brings with it never won any prizes for logic. When I started dating the lady who would become my wife, I read C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves in an attempt to understand what love was, but discovered quickly that reading about it and experiencing it was the difference between reading the recipe and eating the cake. And then I married and thought I had a working definition of love, with all its beauty and grittiness. But it was not until I met my first child that I learned to know nothing at all.
How can a little human, who has done nothing for you but cost you, who has the potential to reject you and break your heart, who will keep you up nights for the next twenty years for varying reasons; how can this little girl come into your life in a whirlwind of pain only to immediately own more real estate of your heart than anyone else in the world? I will never figure this out. Our actions and reactions are measured by a standard so unsullied by other measurements—such as money, greed, lust, self-interest—that it startles us. Are humans capable of a feeling so undefiled? Who knew it would be so much fun to watch a baby sleep?
But why me? Why has God given her to us? After three miscarriages, we know a little about disappointment, but we don’t have the same grief some of my friends do whose families are not forthcoming, and may never come. God knows they are better men. It is as big a grief as losing a brother or sister to death; one simply cannot step over the gulf where a family of one’s own should be. They may live in the presence of that absence all their lives; a grief that can hardly be alleviated. It can only be borne, and usually alone.
I watch my daughter develop the ability to laugh. She does not understand suffering in others, yet. Her laughter is as clear as a mountain stream and contrasts the turgid waters some must pass through. And her heartbreaking innocence gives me a window to the suffering of other children, the suffering of parents and would-be parents, the suffering of all people.
Of the three humans directly involved in a birth, a father suffers the least but there is still some distinct trauma. “How was it?” a friend asks. He pretends to not be concerned as he is slated for a similar experience in a month or two. “Harrowing,” I reply. I had never felt so completely useless to, but uniquely responsible for, the situation at hand.
It unnerved me so that I made an embarrassing grammatical mistake in a text message that miscommunicated my situation to my would-be substitute teacher, so the gracious bishop stepped in and substituted with five minute’s notice while everyone covered their mouth with their hands. “What kind of editor and teacher can’t communicate whether he can or can’t teach?” A friend asks. The obvious response is an editor and teacher who is a father in the making, that’s who. Abandon dignity, all who enter.
A man on the cusp of fatherhood risks all sorts of absurdity when he makes pronouncements about how to raise a family and to be a good version of a father to his children. And yet, I can’t wait till I’m old to act on experience; the situation demands action. Fatherhood, so far, has been a nudge them from the nest to teach them to fly, eagle style. How to raise a perfectly capable soul for its created purpose? I walk in ignorance and act imperfectly, always aware of failure.
It feels feel as though it might have something in common with forestry: start with a tender shoot, don’t eliminate all struggle or they will not climb for the light, you’re going to need to prune. Sometimes you’ll have to sit and wait, other times you’ll worry about them being uprooted in a storm. Not to mention that all foresters set their payday a hundred years hence when they won’t be around to collect. Be kind enough to show them early that the world is not a blank slate to manipulate to fit personal ambition, but that there are civil, moral, and natural laws that will exact a version of justice. There are ethics, too, that need developing, those actions that reveal compassion for all other living creatures.
I know all this. But the eternal, the spiritual, is submerged under the workaday goings-on, and I know that I can only raise the awareness of it to the extent that I make Jesus tactile, bring him visibly into the world. Fatherhood so far has been two steps from enlightenment, one step from failure, and ankle deep in awe and love.
Some nights when I rock her to sleep she reaches up in a blind groping for my face. Her delicate, velvety hand touches my mouth, palm in, as if to shut me up, then she pries her fingers into my mouth and grabs my bottom lip in a death grip. Here is the picture of fatherhood: a man alone in the dark, rocking the world in a wooden rocker, comedy for the father, security for the daughter, she pulling his bottom lip down until he looks like a pelican, until it goes numb.