C I P R I A N I

Any day now, I’ll be a father.  Lately, I’ve been thinking of my own father, his father – hell, any father I ever knew in fact or fiction, honestly.   Only in the past few weeks have I come to realize how abstract a concept fatherhood still is – at least in the immediate short term.  

When I think back on my own childhood, I’m picking and choosing fleeting moments, an abbreviated mosaic of memories, certainly none of them include my day to day life as an infant or more specifically my father’s role in those first few breaths of life.  I’m sure he was there and obviously they happened – I’ve seen pictures – but I think my earliest actual memory was maybe myself at three, maybe two.

So I really have no point of personal reference of what lies right around the corner.

Moments.  Essentially that’s life and shortly his will begin, but actually it’s really been going on for quite a few months now inside the womb, right?  Sleeping, eating, kicking around, I suspect rather comfy and cozily.

An amateur’s knowledge of psychology posits that perhaps he’s about to go through a very traumatic experience.  As joyous as his bursting forth into our world from the womb may be – I can only imagine how that light and noise might feel to his small, helpless body when he finally emerges. 

And yet, maybe that assumed trauma comes from all the pictures seen of the baby “crying”… Still, it’s probably quite a shock to say the least.  

The more I read, the more I discover that crying is really his means of communication at this early stage in his life.  He wants something – to be fed, to have his diaper changed, to be picked up – that doesn’t necessarily mean “put me back in the womb” now, does it?  That first scream of life I would optimistically estimate as a cry for love that I’m more than happy to give and as much as I might want to look at the whole endeavor of fatherhood entirely selflessly, I can’t completely.

It’s a crossroads for me and my wife isn’t it?  I suspect that by having our first child later in life – I’m fairly certain I’m about a decade older than my own father was when he had me – I have perhaps a more advanced world view, in that I’ve probably lost a bit more innocence and accumulated a little more knowledge and have examined myself and others and the universe a little more – but it’s still just passive observation, isn’t it?  Though I’m technically “older” – I still feel younger in a sense than someone who, say, had a child at eighteen.

So in a sense I feel my life is beginning in much the same way my son’s is – this comfort of the womb of somewhat reckless youth, crossing over into the supposed maturity and responsibility of parenthood.  And I imagine I will shed a few misunderstood tears and perhaps even scream as well.  But I do optimistically look forward.

I look at the Norman Rockwell picture, a favorite of mine, and realize that, in a sense, for the first time, I feel equally like both the Young Man and the Old Man in the picture at the same time.