I dream of suction cups

72 hours.

I can do a lot in 72 hours. I can read three books. I can watch the entire 30 Rock catalog twice with no commercials. I can travel to Europe and back five times, maybe even six. Yet, that’s how long it took my now two week old son to travel from uterus to the outside world. Amy was exhausted. Hell, I was exhausted, but she hadn’t eaten anything for over 24 of those hours, not to mention the um…labor: Painful, sporadic, and frustrating. Mix in a few smiles, some tears, and some awkwardly tense moments and that’s the birth experience in a nutshell. I’m not saying there wasn’t any beauty in it. There was. The process as a whole, despite being messy, gross and erratically frantic is still…well, no, it’s not beautiful, but it is one of those moments I won’t forget. It will forever be one of those moments Amy and I will look back on, injecting fondness for nostalgia’s sake into an otherwise draining and horrifying three days.

Outcome: We have a rather surprisingly beautiful baby boy. That’s the beauty of it. Mission accomplished.

He wasn’t always such a perfect little human specimen, though. He had to grow into it a little bit. The long labor and days trying to squish his little head past a non-widening cervix seems to take its toll on not just the mother but the baby, too. Amy had always joked about being in the “John Hurt way” as the little creature growing inside of her poked and prodded, kicked and punched her insides. Sometimes you could follow the baby’s movements through the ripples across her belly, too. That freaked out at least one shocked guy sitting beside her on the subway when he noticed it at a glance. One more notch for beauty in the wonder that is child bearing.

That playful analogy never seemed so real, though, until our midwife ripped him -literally- from the birth canal and plopped what appeared to be a greyish-purpling, floppy blob with a head like an eggplant that resembled the distant cousin of the slimy, acid-spitting Alien onto Amy’s chest . He wasn’t moving. He wasn’t breathing nor crying. Our midwife yelled to get him out of there and the NICU attendees who had been hovering nearby promptly swept in to try and clean up the mess. I barely even saw him. I saw Amy’s face, though, and it wasn’t smiling, and I instantly felt a rushing flood of failure crash over me.

I tried to smile. I tried to feel that sense of “instant change” so many new fathers have told me about. Thing is- that feeling just wasn’t there to summon. I felt like punching myself in the face. Really laying into it to try to rattle some of those Lifetime feelings free from whatever crevice they were stuck in. Even as I rushed to the NICU’s tables like a banged up linebacker crashing through a blockade of hospital machinery and hurtling over wires to peer over the attendee’s shoulders (trying to stay out of their way in the process) to see if we had had a boy or a girl that feeling didn’t come. If it did it was still drenched by that flood of irrational guilt and dread and the sounds of the suctions wrenching the merconium from our son’s lungs. It didn’t come when I heard his first scream moments later, though that sense of dread and guilt began to lift like an evaporating morning dew: Slowly but surely. It didn’t come when I heard his APGAR number raise from a five to a nine just minutes later, but the strangling feelings of guilt and dread were gone and were replaced by, if anything, a new found respect and admiration for my wife. I didn’t think I could love Amy more, but at that moment I knew I had been wrong. What a superstar.

All I could think for my son was that the first thing he really felt was a tube inserted down his throat and the professional, busy hands of the midwife and the NICU attendees. He felt the heat from the lamp above him and smelled the fresh latex gloves and saw the blue-green blurs in white masks that hovered over his little body for the first few minutes of his awake life. Worst of all, the first thing he heard was the suction raging, vacuuming his own shit from deep inside his lungs, mouth and nose. I could only think, as I looked down on Amy and the smile that began to creep across her face, of all that was taken away from him so early in his life, of what he could have had had he been able to lie upon her chest and look up into her eyes and hear her smiling, cooing voice. Instead, would he dream of suction cups? Of the gurgling, rushing whir of the vacuum?


Three days later after a couple of pints in the local “Irish Pub” I told Paul, my father-in-law, about the experience. I wasn’t looking for reassurance or guidance. By that point I had come to terms with the fact that those feelings of “instant change” were lost on me. It was simply because after the first couple of days with my wife and my son that had been the first time I had thought of it. His response was a smirk and a shake of his head. A “that’s a bunch of crap,” followed. I knew it was true. I don’t really know why I expected such a feeling in the first place. Maybe it’s human nature to expect the process that creates something so wonderful to be a wonderful experience in itself with that life-changing epiphany as its ultimate apex. I’m sure it can be, but every experience is different and not all follow that magical yellow brick road. Maybe it’s our nature to exaggerate the beauty of some experiences because the rest of our lives are usually led in such a humdrum fashion so the exceptional must be very exceptional. Maybe it’s so we can tell everyone what a life-changing experience that first look into a newborn’s eyes is.

I think Paul summed it up when he said after another slug on his porter, “It’s a lot of responsibility…and it doesn’t end when they leave the house. It’s forever.” Not that the statement was prophetically profound; it was just completely honest. I hadn’t thought of it until that second. Having been caught up in the whirlwind of having a new baby in our house and all the joy and stress and emotional and often physical discharges that come with it, I realized that was what really mattered. Forever. I already knew the responsibility that had just fallen upon my shoulders in those 72 hours, but forever was the key to the equation I wanted to solve. I had no epiphany because it just isn’t that easy.

So, now, I call bullshit on every man who tells me his life instantly changed the first moment he beheld his child.That, from the very first instant, he knew what his purpose in life was and how he never knew how he could have lived without children before. Not because it didn’t happen for them that way, but because I feel they missed the point if that’s what they’ve focused on. “The cake is a lie.” They’ve misled themselves. Even if the labor and birth had gone perfectly, I still don’t think I would prescribe to that line of epiphanic thought. Better yet, I’m glad and better off for it. Instead, I get to take a journey with my son. It’s a journey that begins with the realization that every time I hold him and he looks bewilderedly into my eyes, every time I change him and he screams at me in protest, every time I turn on the water or some music and he looks around with a sense of awe and wonder, I get a new sense of what it means to be a father. As he grows, I’ll grow with him and every time I look down on him and rub his tummy while he’s sleeping, watching as his eyes flutter beneath closed lids, I’ll wonder, “Are you still dreaming of suction cups?” But, instead of worrying about what he missed out on I’ll plan new ways to give him new dreams. Dreams that will last forever.

By Gavin