Thirty years ago right now I was exhausted and sleeping. So were you. Neither of us as much as your mother who’d gone to hell and back to bring you into this world. This adventure started early in the morning on June 15. It was a Thursday morning, and I had just gotten home from working an all night shift on an assembly line at Torrington Fafnir, a factory that produced bearings for heavy machinery. I put in my eight hours on the 11pm to 7am shift and drove home, took a shower and got in bed. A few minutes later your mother called to me from the bathroom, “My water just broke.” Just like a scene from the movies, I jumped up, got dressed, collected all the stuff and put it in the car, and drove your mother to the hospital, fully expecting to be a dad in a matter of minutes. In reality, it would be twenty-seven hours.
When you did finally arrive, it was quite a dramatic scene. After hours of hard labor, pushing, and attempting to adjust you in the birth canal, I saw the look on Dr. Savage’s face when he told the nurse to call the OR. The previous twenty-seven hours seemed to moved in slow motion, but the next twenty minutes felt like they were in fast forward. You and your mother were in danger and the call was made to remove you surgically, which happened shockingly fast and without any gentleness. I had a front row seat to the literal moment you emerged into our world and became forever entrenched in my heart.
As I stood by watching the nurses care for you, listening to your cries, I ached to hold and comfort you. I’ve never felt anything more viscerally in my life. You weren’t in any real pain or danger, but the mere sound of you in distress awakened things within me that felt ancient and primal. I was still a teenager, but in that moment I knew I was forever a father. Three decades have passed since that moment and I know it and feel it as much now as I ever did. There have been many times in those thirty years that I’ve had to stand by as helplessly as I was that day, but still feeling just as urgently that I needed to comfort you in your pain and distress. Sitting here today, I know that I will feel that anytime I see you in pain, even when I am a weak and frail old man.
Eventually, the nurses finished their work and let me pick you up. I’ve spent so much time over the years thinking about that moment, trying to process it and understand it; trying to figure out how to best describe it. The best I’ve come up with is that it was like a door was opened in my heart to a place inside me that I never even knew existed. There has not been a day in my life that I did not know love, but there have been a very few where I knew love in a transcendent way. The first time I held your mother’s hand, the first time she kissed me, and the first time I held you are three of them. Those waves of love were like supernovas within my soul, a chain reaction of chemicals and energy as unstoppable and as powerful as a nuclear reaction, only this was beautiful and creative instead of destructive. At the same time, it was pure horror. In that moment I knew that I was more vulnerable and susceptible to inescapable pain than I had ever been, and it would never end. To love is to open yourself to the possibility of paralyzing pain. Anything you love is a chink in your protective armor, a place where you can be wounded. As I looked at this tiny thing that I felt so much love for, and such a compulsion to protect, I knew anything that hurt you would hurt me. Thirty years have proven that true.
The universe loves balance, and that means the converse is equally true. Despite all the pain, the love and joy has been worth everything it has cost. Every success, every joy, every happiness you have experienced, I have experienced, and because you are so naturally talented, charismatic, and intelligent, there have been many of those moments through the years. It took me a couple of years to understand the day to day requirements of being a father, but once I did, you were always by my side. Things I’d long ago experienced and forgotten, were new again through your eyes. We always had a million things in common and the older you grew the more our friendship did too. There were years that we were robbed of that friendship, yet I feel no bitterness for it; I only feel gratitude that we got it back and I treasure every second of it more than I did before, because now I know how fragile it can be.
I am proud of what you have accomplished and overcome in your life. You have needed to overcome tremendous obstacles to begin again and start rebuilding your life from scratch numerous times, and you always have. I don’t reflect on all the times you’ve been knocked down, I celebrate the fact that you’ve always been able to get back up. You are stronger than you give yourself credit and better than most people will ever realize. Even when you have been at your lowest, I’ve seen your tender and generous heart shine through the darkness. I hope you will always know that I am grateful that I get to be your father. I have learned from you and grown with you. I am a better person because of my love for you than I ever could have been without it. I hope you will never forget that you are completely and fully loved, accepted and supported simply for existing. There is nothing to do to earn it, all you have to do is accept it and it will always be yours. The best advice I can give you is to pour everything you have in you back into your wife and your two children and it will come back to you a hundred fold, and it will sustain you and drive you when you feel like you have nothing left in you.
Your heart, your sense of humor, and your resilience will always get you through whatever you face. Your best is still before you and what is behind you has been transformed into wisdom and tenacity. If anything knocks you down again, you don’t have to get up by yourself, I will be here to help pick you up, just like I did on day one.
Comments
Post a Comment