A Winter's Breath

[Trigger Warning: Graphic imagery, sensitive content.]

“He’s crowning, one more big push, mama,” the midwife says, “Dad, would you like to see?”

This white-washed birthing suite feels like walking barefoot in the snow, arching under chirping monitors in flight headed southbound. What a view the winter night sky must have, looking down at these bright blue blinking lights, and my wife, snow-angelled in soft white sheets. Her legs spread agape like my mouth in awe of her furious might; her bare legs tremble, braced within the crook of the nurse’s elbows. They arch like a truss on a bridge, guiding life onto Earth over covenant waters. It’s the simplest word, a title of parenthood, that crowns me so diligently aware that I’m about to bear responsibility for another life, an anointment of sweat smeared like David’s boy. I want to freeze this moment and bask in the excitement I feel, but I cannot simply sit in anticipation forever, and with my mind running as ragged as her breathing, I start to think of all the infinite what-ifs: What if I am a bad parent? What if I regret fatherhood? What if I lose my patience? What if I hurt him? My mind becomes dim-lit and dizzy, like the pocket of my father’s suit, and I picture him and think, He did alright.

My father is a close-minded man; he harbours a steady living like a creature of habit, tucked and burrowed at his paper desk, wearing his paper hat. He isn’t a bad man, nor is he a terrible father compared to his own father; he raised my two sisters and I, he kept a roof over our heads, hot meals on the table and clothes on our backs, and he let our mother dance barefoot in the living room with her hair down; a tangled weaver, she spun stories that kept us kids from becoming paper people. My father would say to us growing up, Heavy is the head; happy is the fool. Forgive me, Dad, for I am a fool.

I peer over the precipice at my new life beginning. Late nights with the boys will be replaced with bedtime stories and soft lullabies, a run down to the liquor store for cheap beer will be to the twenty-four-hour convenience store for size zero diapers and Tylenol, and the quiet of our two-person home will be replaced by a third presence of gasps and giggles.

His crown is emerging laboriously between my wife’s thighs, downy with dark tufts of coiled curls, slick with mucus and vernix; there’s more blood than I imagined. I shake with her, but fear eats me instead of the biting frost at her hips. Can he breathe in that sea? Overwatered, he’s bogged and ambiguous, teetering between the unknowns of this world and a fictitious ocean far wilder than ours. I peer closer, like I can will him to come sooner to ease my panic, to ease my wife’s pain. My brain, traitor that it is, tries to picture him. Perhaps he’ll have my blue eyes, or my wife’s tawny ones, lambent by the amber sun in Fall, and lustred a vermeil under these garish lights. Hopefully, he’ll have her button nose instead of my allergy-ridden protuberance. God, please don’t let him have my nose. I remind myself not to build him before he’s even here, so I pray to let him arrive as he is, even if he should emerge looking exactly like me, the poor bastard.

I just know I’ll have to parent myself out of him. I was such an asshole kid in my youth, and I think back to when I met my wife in school, and I think, how did a shmuck like me snag a woman like her? I used to talk too much, I got in trouble for roughing up my friends, and I kicked our soccer ball so hard it went through the gym’s shed window. My wife is smart, while back then, I was barely pulling average, and yet she had a moment of weakness and saw something in me that no other girl did. Crazy woman. And even crazier for saying yes when I proposed to her three years after graduation. Though, everyday I am grateful she did.

She groans, low and guttural, nothing like the sounds she makes in our bed at home, but something animalistic, like the crescent-shaped claw marks she’s leaving in my palms. It’s nothing compared to her pain. The thought of her in bed lingers shamefully at this moment; I’ve seen her body thousands of times, in many positions, but none as vulnerable nor courageous as this. And when she shrinks back to before, and coerces me into bed to try for our second child in a few years, I’ll remember who she has been, a Goddess, a woman, a mother.

“That’s it, another push, mama,” the midwife encourages once more, “he’s nearly here.”

I thought I’d be more disgusted by the raw, grotesque sight of her body splitting in two, sowing a sea of poppy seeds from war’s end, that maybe I would grimace—or faint—but I know that once the sleet melts away in the summer heat, poppies will rise one by one and giggle, and dance down the hall tirelessly. Her body is hunched and folded, opening with each breath before a push like those paper cootie catchers girls made in middle school. She’s focused and pleading with God inside her head, I just know. And she’ll plead more, during hard nights when he cries and won’t sleep, when he stinks so bad it strips the paint off the walls, when she is overwhelmed and restless in bed, and when I inevitably piss her off trying to help her. She’ll plead when she’s happy, too: please don’t let him grow too fast. Please savour the moment of his first smile, first laugh, and his first words. Please keep him in my arms just a little longer. And I plead too, that the pain doesn’t tear her apart more than it is, that she can bring our son into the world with ease, and that she won’t be stuck with the same ratbag child I used to be. I plead to see him, to hold him, just a little more, and you’ll be here.

In one big push, his head slides out, and the nurse gives him a light tug and twist, rotating his shoulders, and then he pops out in a gush of blood and fluid, still tethered by a fleshy lifeline that pulses with the remnants of his mother’s sanctum. He’s flipped along the midwife’s forearm with practiced ease, facing downwards as she quickly rubs his back to help him reach his first breath, drifting like a puff of cool winter’s air. It’s the pocket of silence, akin to my father’s furrowed brow, that clenches my heart in a vice and has my wife’s neck craned, searching for her son that seems to last for eternity. For a moment, we’re suspended in hell on Earth, a glimpse of what could be, and what ruthlessly has been for others. A small intrusive whisper hovers over my shoulder that holds the same weight as my father’s hand on a tough day: should we leave the hospital with our son left behind, so stays with him, our worries of parenthood; it seems easier not to have this much to lose than to love someone this greatly at all. The pursuit of love comes with varying levels of pain; it is for a parent to lose their child before their own time has come, that it would be easier not to know love at all.

Then, out cries a shrill wail, outraged and indignant. The nurse dries the floury substance off his body, wraps him in a pale blue blanket, and places the crying bundle on my wife’s bare chest. She sobs with him, laughing a little in relief. As I, now a father to my son, am relieved, a fool basking in happiness, I cry too. He’s too fresh into this world to determine which of us he looks like most; he’s mauve and wrinkly, wriggling with anger of being forced into such a bright winter evening, but thank God, he has her nose.

I cut the umbilical cord with an irrevocable and tentative crunch between the sheen of frosted blades, separating mother from child; our son is his own being. I hold him after that, like holding a snowflake before it melts on the skin. But he’s warm, and alive, and I’m in awe that I helped create this tiny creature, and he’s mine to love always, through melting snow and giggling poppies dancing in the Spring.