Christmas Is… 2006

Posted December 16th, 2006 by Sean Williams

There is probably some kind of lawsuit in the fact that fathers go home and mothers stay in the hospital with the baby. What the hell am I supposed to do with myself.

I mean, besides drink. Which I’ve been doing since this morning.

So, listen, I’m sure that the metaphysical glory of fatherhood will descend on me, and when it does, none of you will be spared my particular brand of sanctimoniousness, but that’s not what today was about for me.

If there is a gender war, and I’ve always claimed there isn’t, but if there is, ladies, you need do nothing but wait. Let those furry fart machines say whatever the hell they want, let them make claims about brain size and the WNBA and anything else they want to, because, at some point, all of that will be… it will cease to have meaning. It will become meaningless.

At the end of the night tonight, I said to Jordana “I know something you will never know.” And that thing is the knowledge that nothing I will ever do, nothing that my father, my brothers or any of my guy friends ever do, will ever be as impossible to do as what she had just done, and that nothing I, the brothers, fathers and friends do that is close to being that incredible will ever come close to being accomplished with the kind of grace, beauty, and strength that I just saw Jordana go through.

I looked at my boy, laid out naked, all 22 inches and nearly 10 pounds of him (which I mention mostly because, well, there isn’t much else to him right now except for length, width and mass) and as much as I was knocked out by the fact that he seemed to be built exactly like Jordana, I knew we shared one more thing. That neither of us would ever be able to do what his mom did. And really, what my mom and all of our moms did.

I will leave the details to someone else, and for a much distant time, when the preggernauts around have been through this demonic ritual and we can all look back and laugh. I’m so tired, I’m about ready to rip off my own nuts.

But I have to be honest, the rest of the night I had one part of my brain always looking back on that room where we ripped life right out of the nicest girl I know, and where she smiled and laughed and cried with joy even at the utter apex of pain, and even though I just don’t think I learned anything about being a father, I was given a crash course in the utterly astonishing truth of what it is to be a mother.