My wife is 7 months pregnant. A few months ago we found out it was a boy, and that news shook me to my core.
It happened in a hospital waiting room for expecting mothers, while sitting on a lavender couch. We’d been expecting the message from our doctor for days, and when we finally saw that it had arrived we did what any hip-with-the-times couple does these days: we clicked record on my phone to capture this wondrous moment.
Which we were just certain would reveal a baby girl.
Leading up to this moment we’d been on a 7-year struggle with infertility, of countless doctors visits, invasive procedures, and one major surgery. After repeated cycles of hope crashing into disappointment and devastation, we’d accepted having our own child together wasn’t in the cards for us and so graduated to the IVF Donor leagues. If given the choice, which IVF donors tend to enable, we were gonna have a girl. We’d already been speaking her chosen name for years, convinced that despite the obstacles in our way, she was inevitable. Even when, to our utter astonishment, we suddenly got pregnant naturally, mere weeks before inserting an embryo with borrowed genes, we remained inwardly assured of a girl.
Also, I reeeeeally wanted to be a #girldad. For years I’d envisioned a little girl’s big soulful eyes, same as her mother’s, looking up at me. In a world where I’ve often struggled to fully receive love from another (to my wife’s enduring frustration), I suppose I’ve believed that the innocent love of an adorable little girl who loves me more than anything might finally be the magical key to unlocking my enduringly guarded heart.
Sounds a bit ”fairy tale villain” when I say it out loud. I’m just saying the thought of having a little girl melts my stoic insides to a warm, sticky goo; it turns me into chocolate lava cake, which is delicious, and which I’d love to offer more of to my wife and the world around me (my warm gooey heart, to be clear, not actual lava cake).
As we scrambled to open the message, all that naive anticipation (here comes our little girl!) reflected back on our faces on my phone’s screen like a radiant desert mirage. The hospital’s weak wi-fi teased our yearning with a tiny spinning wheel of fortune on Silvy’s phone screen. We begged, pleaded, demanded! to know (confirm) our destiny already!
After a baby-sized eternity there suddenly appeared 5 words, which Silvy read aloud:
“You’re having a little boy!”
I saw my face in the screen. I instantly froze. My heart began to sink into my gut, which was free falling into an abyss of despair. I was a sudden quicksand mix of anger, sadness, confusion, fear. In that moment, I felt bamboozled .. hoodwinked .. tricked! .. by Life or God or the Fates or whoever presides over such abominable coin tosses as these!
My wife, also shocked, was nonetheless ecstatic.
It’s difficult to fully articulate what was happening for me in that fateful moment.
Should my son ever read these words in the future, I want him to know that my disorientation didn’t last more than a few days, that it had nothing to do with him, and that I already know he (alongside his mom) is truly the greatest blessing to ever inspire my life.
But in that moment, I’d become a simmering hot cauldron of turmoil.
In the days after, I came to see in that moment that a tsunami of held-back grief was threatening to burst through the protective walls I’d built long ago to keep it at bay. My disoriented face was the dam creaking against its overwhelming force.
I’ve been estranged from my own father for decades. I’ve barely seen or talked with him in the last 15 years, and the 15 years before that were a slow spiral towards our final falling out. I’ve done a lot of therapy and healing father-wound work around all that. If the next time we visit each other is over a gravestone, I’ve come to genuine peace with that. In fact, I genuinely think our relationship will greatly improve once one of us is dead.
So it was also a shock when, in the instant my girl-dad dream evaporated and a baby boy appeared in its place, what I thought were dead and buried “daddy issues” suddenly began to rise inside like zombies poking bandaged heads and mangled hands up through cold graveyard dirt.
When Silvy sang out, “a son!” I couldn’t hear those words in her voice, or even my own. I could only hear them from the mouth of the man who’d said them to me countless times in the first 25 years of my life, and who’d also long since abdicated fatherhood for other pursuits.
So I didn’t hear joy or excitement or even the promise of good times to come. Instead what I heard modulated atop the word, “son,“ was a lifetime of disconnection, disappointment, and unspeakable grief.
The Sufi poet, Ghalib, wrote, “grief held back, unspoken, bruises the heart.”
The startling appearance of a son was like a sunbeam poking through darkened curtains, shining unwanted light on the hidden places where my heart remained bruised.
In “my son” I heard a boy’s enduring hope for his dad’s presence repeatedly obliterated by the choices of a man who ran off over the rainbow to find himself … and never came back.
I heard the grief-filled silence of a father’s absence; the ghostly echo of Rilke’s man who stood up from the supper table, who went outside and never came back, and who left his children among the dishes and the glasses to say blessings on his name as if he were dead.
The words, “my son,” clearly still contain pain for me.
Because I’d heard them spoken ten thousand times by a man who slowly abandoned his children to pursue his own glory in the world .. or whatever his reasons.
It’s tempting to insist the word lacks potency as a consequence, but it’s more true to say it remains potently charged with anger and sadness.
No doubt countless parents through the ages have experienced this difficult moment, whether they’d silently hoped or actively petitioned for one sex over the other. I’m hardly the first to have my future instantly rewritten the moment Life strikes its blue-sky lightning bolt into the heart of my hopes as fierce reminder of who runs this show and who doesn’t.
That said, I now have a son who will soon – should the Fates continue to favor us – be looking up into my eyes. Which means I also have no meaningful choice other than to reclaim the word as my own.
And I will do what must be done: rip it from my absent father’s mouth and mash it around inside my own until it is reinvigorated with a magnificent potency such that it can only truly serve the life and spirit of … my son.
♦◊♦
**Note: My thoughts about raising a boy in a world where boys are being hunted by the toxic manosphere, smartphone porn and gambling apps, AI girlfriends and countless other present and future terrors, is for a future essay.