Two weeks ago I woke up to find an SMS waiting to be read on my phone. It read: “This is to inform that we have been blessed with a bouncing baby girl. Baby Frida joined us last night at 2a.m weighing a good 4.5kgs. Mother and baby are fine. Praise be to the Lord.”
(All SMSes announcing babies always seem to end in this clichéd fashion: ‘mother and baby are fine’. I find it lazy. Mother and baby are fine? Sigh. How about: “Mother is weak but glowing, baby is bewildered.” Or, “Mother lost her voice from all the screaming, baby’s ears are ringing. Both are fine and in separate beds.”)
So anyway, I decide to go visit baby Frida (and mother) at the hospital. I get there and find mother in bed. She has that jaded post-labour look – you know the one where her smile looks crooked? Or maybe that’s because her face is swollen.
Upon closer inspection, I find out that indeed she is swollen; her hands, feet, nose, lips. But she is a brave one; she pushed instead of opting for Caesarean.
Standing behind her bed is the new baba, my friend. The new baba is also swollen… around his eyes. I think it’s due to lack of sleep. Or maybe he was crying during labour as well, who knows?
My ‘Best Wishes’ card sits behind a forest of pink cards (the small cards go at the back). The little bouquet of flowers I have brought are propped up against a gigantic basket of flowers. I feel inadequate and somewhat cheap. In fact, I’m certain that I am cheap.
We make small talk – you know the usual idle banter about colic-induced lack of sleep and all that doodah. Mother smiles like a Chesire cat. Baba stifles a yawn.
Eventually, her highness baby Frida is wheeled in. She was in the nursery having her nails done, I presume. Her face looks reddish and bruised, like she was in a bad fight in the nursery. A fight she obviously lost. She is asleep, swaddled into a ball the size of a huge pawpaw. Her face peeks out from this ball. Is she pretty? No, I don’t find most one-day-olds pretty. They always become pretty after the first month. But she is adorable.
“She looks just like you,” I tell the mother. “Smart girl… she picked only the gene that mattered.” Mother rewards me with a small smile. Baba stifles a yawn.
I don’t carry the baby because I find them too fragile when they are younger than one week. Hell, I couldn’t even carry my own baby when she was born. So I make some excuse about my hands being dirty from fumbling with my radiator. Baba stifles another yawn.
After twenty minutes of social correctness, I pat the new mother on the arm (the side that doesn’t look too swollen) and bid her goodbye. Baba and I step out for a manly tete-a-tete.
The bitter truth is, men don’t really decide when we are going to be fathers. A whole bunch of us have fatherhood thrust upon us. Some of us take it in our stride, others take to the hills. Men who refuse to take on fatherhood are easily ridiculed for being weak and spineless.
But fatherhood isn’t a walk in the park. It’s no Blankets and Wine where you sit on some green grass and sip wine while you listen to Kidum. It is serious business. It jars the soul and sometimes, some men need a bit more time than others to take to those diapers.
At the centre of the flight or fight debate is usually freedom. It’s easy to imagine that once a baby shows up, your freedom will be nipped at the bud. There might some truth in there, but not all truth.
But more importantly, any man who is over 25 and is earning any sort of income has no excuse to turn his back on his child. But I have noticed that the guys who walk away are never really walking away from their child; mostly it’s the woman they don’t want to be with. Cowardly yes, but one that can be explained, not excused.
These are fellows who have been seeing a girl for two months and wham, she’s pregnant. He has no plans to marry; she expects him to step up and be with her. When he cringes, she goes bananas. He flees.
Some men come around when the fright (and flight) wears off and reason sets in, and they end up becoming decent fathers. Others never do. And yet, some, like Baba, have fears that they can’t place their fingers on. “I feel different. I feel disillusioned,” Baba tells me. I tell him it’s nothing that a stiff drink won’t kill. He will be fine. I know it.
To all the Babas out there, grappling with new fatherhood, thinking that they have been thrown under the bus, relax; it’s never that serious. Smile and enjoy your new found fatherhood.
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