A Father’s Arms
Aaron is in my arms and I relish the weight of him pressing down on my chest. He is a bundle, wrapped in a blanket, his breathing still too fast though not as fast as a few hours ago, before the antibiotics were hooked to his IV. The hospital foldaway bed is small and my feet stick out over the end like a child’s. It is late and the ward corridor outside is quiet.
He nuzzles into me a little, a dream playing across his face, wrinkling his features into a half smile. My hand plays down his back, stroking him as he moves through layers of sleep. After a little of this he settles, finds a deeper rest and nestles into it, becoming still, his only movement the rise and fall of his chest. I probe his palm with the index finger of my hand, hoping he will grip it and he does. His small fingers wrap around my much larger one and squeeze tightly and softly and completely. We fit. I smile, holding my baby boy as he holds me.
His sleep is not entirely peaceful now, he still fidgets and coughs at times, but I am glad for whatever rest he is getting, his first since he was admitted two days ago. Initially there was some confusion over whether Aaron’s symptoms were evidence of a bacterial infection or a simple virus; the hope was for the later but with his temperature remaining high above normal range and his chest infection worsening the doctor finally diagnosed pneumonia and hooked him up to intravenous antibiotics.
A nurse comes in to check on us. In the light from the door I see her smile when she notices Aaron huddled into my chest.
‘Guten Abend,’ I say, greeting her with what little German I have learnt in our two years here.
‘All is okay?’ she asks. Her accent is thick and strange to my ears yet her English is much better than my German, I am sure.
‘Ja,’ I reply.
She steps softly to the drip and checks the bottle.
‘I come back and change soon, give him fluids,’ she says before moving quietly back to the corridor.
In the dark once more, I listen to Aaron’s breathing. I miss Susie and Ethan, both at home now, missing us. All four of us are finding this forced separation hard; two duos made from our quartet. It is hard to be apart from them, and, as soon as children take up residence in your life, it is hard to imagine life before them. The memories are there but something is missing, like the sensation of a phantom limb made stranger by the fact that you miss it before it ever existed. It is as if the memories of your children are so rich they crowd out everything else, even invading the spaces where your life before them resides.
The night Ethan was born was another hospital panic, Susie’s labour a twenty-seven hour marathon ending in an epidural; preparation for a c-section in the event that Ethan could not be safely delivered with forceps and Venteuse. The meconium that the doctors had found when examining her told them Ethan was likely becoming distressed and it was time to get him out fast. At the end of a long day of contractions, controlled breathing and little food, time seemed to quicken, everything happening in snapshots.
Outside, phoning family quickly before Susie is taken to theatre.
Hurrying back along the ancient, almost subterranean central corridor back to Salisbury Hospital’s maternity wards, desperately wishing everything be okay.
Back with Susie, holding her hand again.
Walking next to her as the bed is wheeled to the operating room.
In the changing room, getting dressed for theatre.
Uncomfortable and faintly ridiculous in the gown and gloves, I urge Susie to push in chorus with the nurses. One nurse in particular, her hand placed on my wife’s belly to feel the contractions, tries to ensure correct timing, the epidural having robbed Susie of any sensation from the spasms wracking her womb.
Again, time snaps and moments flash past like pages of a flickbook. There’s a crown. Then a head, bawling and streaked with mucus. At last a baby slips out. He is cleaned and checked and placed in my arms and I am staring into the eyes of my son for the first time as he blinks and squints at the brightness of the operating room.
‘His eyes,’ I say, ‘he’s got amazing eyes.’
I put out a finger to see if he will grasp it, push softly into his palm and watch his tiny purpled fingers spread out and around, exploring my index finger in a gentle fumble. I am babbling, desperate to share these first moments with Susie, to make up for stealing the first cuddle with our son. Smiling, she assures me that it’s okay, that the epidural means she shouldn’t take him just yet. Ethan is still crying, protesting the brightness of the light, the openess of the air. I hold him close as he mourns the loss of the womb.
Once Susie is ready, I hand Ethan over. He settles, content to be held by the woman who has carried him for nine months. Later in the ward I hold Ethan again, a cuddle before I make my way back to an empty house, leaving my wife and son halfway across town in a maternity ward crammed with other mothers and their babies. I stroke his face, keeping my hand well away from the top of his head where a large bruise is forming from the vacuum extraction of the vonteuse. I try to bathe in the moment but all too soon am shooed off by a grumpy ward sister.
Now, lying on a camp bed in a German hospital, those memories feel vivid, present. I stroke Aaron’s back while thinking of Ethan, who is five now and so much bigger than the baby handed to me by the midwife back in Salisbury. I think of how protective of his little brother Ethan was aged three, when Aaron arrived home from the maternity ward of this same hospital just two days after he was born. Ethan stood over the moses basket staring in at Aaron as he slept and asked everyday if Aaron was big enough to play with, impatient for his promised playmate. I cuddle Aaron a little tighter, missing my bigger son.
When Ethan was born, walking that long corridor back to the maternity ward, I found myself talking to my father. He had been dead a couple of years by then but calling on him in a time of crisis was obviously still some comfort. I hadn’t felt the need to do that over the last few days with Aaron. I try to think of exactly when I outgrew this. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact I am now as old as my Dad is in my first memories of him. As a father, I am finally my own father’s contemporary.
My father didn’t get to attend the birth of my older brother but was there for mine. I picture him as the muscular figure of the family album from those times, holding me moments after my birth, just as I held Ethan and Aaron moments after theirs. I know I will have looked at him just as Ethan and Aaron looked at me but of course I have no memory. Tragic that we should forget such a central experience in our lives, a moment parents remember forever but children lose before they ever really have it.
Having held my sons I can put myself in my father’s place, feel the pride and love flowing from every pore, the desire to will that feeling into the delicate bundle held carefully in arms suddenly too big, too clumsy. Holding Aaron now, miles and years from where I was born, I can feel my father holding me, his father holding him, a line of father’s holding sons that stretches back into generations I am embarrassed to admit I have no knowledge of. A succession of fathers and sons, each pair born from the pair preceding them, reaching into the distance of years. I hold my son. My father holds me. His father holds him. A dizzying illusion of embrace after embrace.
Dan Powell usually writes made up stories some of which have appeared or are forthcoming in the pages of Neon, Metazen, The View From Here, Litsnack and Dirty Bristow. This is his first published piece of creative non-fiction. He goes on and on about stuff at danpowellfiction.com
