Along Came a Son

My first son entered the world in 2001, less than a month after the planes hit the towers, an event that did nothing to quell the uncertainties already associated with having a child. Invariably that's what I think about when I see those smoking towers on TV, and the broadcasters never pass up an opportunity to replay that footage. I was about to have a kid and was working construction while in between corporate gigs, frustrated in my job search and unsure what parenthood would bring, against a backdrop of terrorism and war.
One question with which I wrestled before my son's conception was the rationale for having children. A school of thought holds that our wily DNA, concerned purely with its own survival, somehow compels us to procreate. There could be some merit to this argument. Lions and giraffes have babies, right? And they probably don't take exhaustive personal inventories beforehand. So there's something compelling them to sustain the gene pool. And if you've ever seen a video of lions fucking, I think it's doubtful that pleasure is their primary motivator. It looks awkward and fast and the female does some scary-looking biting and growling.
There's another school of thought that maintains that it's our duty to churn out productive little citizens and that a failure to do so would be equivalent to undermining the very fabric of our society. It's not only weird to be childless, especially if you're married, but immoral. The world, however, is replete with examples of human beings whose parents would have done well to ignore such reasoning. In other words, those fuckers should have used contraception.
So I questioned why I wanted to have children. Was I being selfish? I once spoke to a mother who said she had children solely for selfish reasons. While her candor was appreciated, her motives were less so. Not only did I not want to be selfish, but I had grave concerns about passing along some negative characteristics and reservations about the guilt I would suffer if I were to subject a child to even a fraction of the distress I had to endure. Depression can be frightening, and life-threatening, and I imagined the ramifications if my own child were to have similar experiences.
Imagining what that would be like didn't even reasonably approximate what I now know it would be like. Such imagination occurred in the abstract then, when I was childless, whereas now, given the extent to which my kids have hypnotized me, their suffering would be hardly bearable. But that recognition didn't come overnight. What came overnight was disruption, the likes of which my wife and I never imagined, and she bore that disruption more than I did. Over at least the first six months, and I think more, I wondered continuously what we had wrought. I initially abdicated the majority of the child-care responsibility, I think largely because I didn't know what to do with this...creature. I knew he had to eat, and he cried and needed bathing and changing. And he didn't sleep enough. He was a "he," but he hadn't yet graduated to human-being status in the sense with which I was familiar. He didn't take well to his formula. Each night when I got into bed, I lay there unable to sleep, muscles tensed, waiting for his coughing, with the regularity of Old Faithful, to begin. Night after night after night of just tension. And his mother was tired and trying to recover from childbirth itself.
Speaking of childbirth, I should have had an inkling from the get-go that this whole experience was something different. We arrived at the hospital at about 8 a.m. for induction on an unusually warm October day. So it was uncomfortable in the room to begin with, but the real discomfort for both of us wouldn't arrive until about 10 or so hours later. First there was the epidural, which seemed to do wonders for my wife but little to nothing for me. I was pretty fucking bored and could have used a pharmaceutical diversion myself, but I hung tough.
Eventually, they let the epidural's effect wane, because you apparently need to know when to push after those contractions get closer together. That's when it seemed to get uncomfortable. There were no profane tirades launched at me, but there did seem to be an air of surrender to the pain. This went on for about two hours, if I remember correctly, before the kid started to make his way down the chute. He appeared to be a reluctant participant in this process, as he sometimes appears now, eight years later, to be a reluctant participant in getting out the door to go somewhere, for example. Anyway, this kid was big, about nine pounds, with a disproportionately large head. Hence the episiotomy. I recommend this to anyone: stand by and watch that patch of flesh between at the bottom of your wife's vagina get cut open with scissors like Christmas wrapping paper. At this point, anyway, we're making some progress, with the kid having a wider tunnel through which to pass. Not that there wasn't some prodding. And I was tired, too, having to help hold my wife's legs open and stuff. Standing the whole time, too. Eventually, the kid squirts out, in an eruption of bodily fluids, leaving me awash in such a placenta soup that I should have known right there I would never be the same. The miracle of childbirth created a disturbing spectacle. But he had all his fingers and toes, and they cleaned him up and put him on the hot plate, and we got to take our little bundle of joy home a few days later.
Relatively speaking, that would be short-lived, since we were back in the hospital four moths later after I can't remember how many visits to the the doctor and emergency room for his coughing and apparent respiratory difficulty. At the hospital, he stayed in and oxygen tent, basically a piece of plastic covering a crib into which a pump delivers oxygen. We monitored the oxygen content of his blood and jumped up to check displays every time an untoward beep sounded. A restless four-month-old, however, is bound to dislodge some of the equipment attached to him. The doctors diagnosed bronchialitis, or the constriction of an already pencil-thin airway. His mother slept there, and I went home and tended the dogs and went to my new job and then back to the hospital, never shaking the helpless feeling. After three or four or five days, I had a telephone conversation with the doctor, who asked me if I felt comfortable taking my son home. I didn't, not completely, but I figured that wasn't going to go away and that we had to get out of there. So we did, and we had our nebulizer and albuterol and blew that medicine in his face a few times a day, usually when he was eating, because he would stay still for that.
At this point, I'm still wondering what we had done. Of all the thoughts coursing through my mind at the time, I'm most mortified and ashamed about thinking what it would be like if he didn't come home. At the same time, I was petrified that he wouldn't be able to, a germ of parental concern appearing that would subsequently make me wonder how I could have entertained such notions and what I would do now were I to find myself without my children. First-time parents, however, are in a quandary. Parental instinct doesn't kick in, at least in my experience, like it does for the aforementioned lions. Instead, childbirth delivers overwhelming responsibilities. Other people assured me that they also had experienced emotions in the aftermath of their first child's arrival similar to those with which I was grappling. I assumed, incorrectly, that some knowledge of how to handle a newborn came more readily to females. I try to manage the traces of guilt and shame that remain by attempting to be a parent whom my kids will think of fondly when they are of an age where they recall their childhoods.
I spend the time with them. I play ball. I don't dismiss them when they ask the first question...or the 101st, all seemingly within half an hour. I try to listen to the latest Harry Potter update and be enthusiastic about the most recent level unlocked on the Star Wars videogame. I try not to be upset about the back seat of my car resembling a porcine feed trough, the cereal grains seemingly having become so embedded that they have created a new fabric patterns, with multihued lollipop residue and bottom-of-the-soccer-spike mud for accents. I read to the kids. I try to encourage them while offering constructive criticism, especially when it comes to sports, and therein lies a great challenge. I want them to become what they want to become, in contrast to me, who didn't receive encouragement to pursue a path that actually held interest. But it can be exhausting. I try to remind myself that each day presents a new opportunity to become more patient and a better listener, and sometimes I fail. On those days when my emotional reading is at such a level that I can barely tolerate myself, I have to look for a deeper reservoir to satisfy them. Someday I suspect they'll go through a phase where they hate me, and I want to take advantage now of their desire to include me.
As much as anything, we fish. When I first started taking my older son fishing, he was still in diapers, and I didn't know if I was doing it for him or me. "What's the difference?" my therapist asked. The difference was that I thought I should be doing it for him, but my derivation of collateral benefit made me question my motives. In retrospect, I think I was (and do) do it for us both. Fortunately, he has taken to it like, well, a fish to water. The time we have spent fishing, the time we have spent in our boat has been some of the most rewarding. On my favorite Father's Day to date, my son and I stood in a lake and fished for hours.
Having a son gave me, eventually, a sense of purpose. I don't know if it was selfish. I don't know if subconsciously I knew that having a child would help to ensure my own survival because I wouldn't shirk my responsibility to him, I wouldn't abandon him, as my father had done to me. As I watch my son now, I see him transforming. In some ways, he's unrecognizable from the toddler I knew, and when I look at the pictures from years past, the ambivalence settles upon me. I long for the boy who lay on my chest, yet I find particular satisfaction in his development and his intellectual grasp, in teaching him and the resultant progress. Along with his progress comes the realization that my peers and I inexorably are aging, approaching if not already having surpassed the inflection point, at which we're closer to death than birth. At times, I merely stare at my children, mesmerized by their beauty and confounded by their presence, unsure of my fitness to be their steward when I have difficulty handling myself.
The children have shattered my notion of love. While I once thought I knew what love was, I realize now my conception often was more of an intellectual formulation and that I failed to account for infatuation. I didn't really know what love was before, and while I considered myself chivalrous enough to push a damsel out of the way of a steaming locomotive, for example, there is no comparison to the lengths to which I would be willing to go to protect my children.
When my son was about three years old, we went to a fair. As the Ferris wheel lifted us, I held on to him as if clinging to life itself. Around and around we went, our metal bucket piercing the darkening sky with each successive revolution, the people on the ground becoming less vivid and then fleetingly coming back into focus as we passed. We ascended above the treetops as the distant stars shone in relief against the darkened horizon. And peace, however fleeting, descended upon me. He kicked and screamed about having to get off the ride, and I felt the same.