Standing in the hospital room watching my daughter emerge from her mothers body and come into this world was an experience of such power; such overwhelming emotion and such huge love that it is almost impossible to write those feelings down. It was the same way when my son was born.
As a father, you do not feel as if this miracle of birth is something exclusive to the mother. You know, that the child being born has half of you within its make up. You know, that the child could not be there were it not for you. You know, that although you do not have the privilege to carry and produce this wonder, nevertheless, over the nine months you have waited for this moment you have invested as much fear, joy, hope, trepidation and ecstatic, stupefying happiness into this child as the mother has.
When they handed me the wet, wrinkled mess that looked, faintly, like a tiny red bull dog with wisps of blond hair, I experienced a sudden and explosive rush of tender love which created a bond that was deep and eternal. In that moment, I was deeply in love, not just with the new baby, but with its mother, myself and the whole world. They say that love can make the most serious man into a fool and it is true. In those sweet moments I loved the midwife, the doctors, the anaesthetists, the woman in the hospital canteen who served me tea when I was waiting to see my partner and the guy in the car park, who told me a way of parking so I would not be charged money. I could cheerfully have kissed them all because all of them had taken a part, however small, in the birth of our child.
As I looked into that new born child’s eyes, I felt as alive as she did. Throbbing, vibrating and trembling with a new life, filled with wonder. Both the child and myself cried and then, I swear, she looked up at me and smiled. Suddenly and without warning: Her wailing ended and she smiled.
My heart exploded in glorious, divinely perfect love.
For the longest time I could not speak. It was impossible for me to utter a lucid language. My brain was staggered by the emotion it was trying to deal with and that cascade of electrical activity caused my tongue to fold up on itself and refuse to work. Had I tried to speak I would have babbled incoherently. Instead, I was lost in the moment, like a stupefied, silently crying and smiling idiot.
In a world that devalues fatherhood today, those were blessed days. Having those children was more than just pride. They were life transforming moments that made everything that had gone before, no matter how thrilling and exciting seem like ennui, bathed in stagnant, soporific fossilisation.
Something mystical is passed between a new born child and its parents in those moments. It is an elusive and yet tangible power, of intense oneness. Heart to heart. Soul to soul. Spirit to spirit. A power that no agnostic and no spiritless, dead-hearted, atheist could ever feel and not recognise as coming from God. Too powerful to be human alone and too deep to fathom. Too esoteric to be mans alone and too profoundly basic to comprehend.
I kissed her new form and looked at her smile back at me. They say that a new child cannot see clearly, but I know that our eyes met that day. A recognition occurred between us that today, 28 years later, I still see in my daughters eyes. Love zipped back and forth between myself and this new bundle of tiny, perfection carried on the mysterious currents of that first knowing gaze. Life greeted life in that instant and my soaring spirit met a new and trusting spirit in her tiny body. Parenthood had also been born and for joy, I was struck dumb with the wonder of it all.
With all of this came a fierce determination that no one would ever hurt her. It dwelt within me, deep inside, like a brooding and menacing, primeval fixation. For every positive in life and photography, there must be a negative. Negatives produce the positive. Without the negative emotion of fear, or the feeling of pain, most of us would not live past the age of ten. Without that negative determination and quietly roaring, internal protective instinct, a fathers children could not be safe in a hostile world. It is a powerful emotion that must be tamed. Tamed and then taught to our sons and daughters. Most men learn to tame this powerful instinct. A fact, that mothers who steal children from fathers would do well to be grateful for! Were it not for men’s capacity to tame such power within their hearts, there would be a lot more dead single mothers than there are.
When a woman tells a man that he cannot see his children, she is stealing all of the above and not just the physical presence of the child. She is playing the devil and stealing his bond with the child. Their bond. To justify her actions she must then brainwash the child to become as hateful as she is, or face the wrath of that child later. It takes a special kind of sickness to do that to a father and his child. Without genuine reason to protect that child, she is nothing short of a monstrous abuser. Yet, our world today is filled with these creatures and many of them get their foul ideas that it is OK to do this to fathers, from a bitter and sick, disgustingly dark and narrow minded media. A media that puts more store in left wing ideology than in human compassion.
It never ceases to amaze me that those who profess no faith in God so often act like the devil. They exist in a dark and evil shell that delights in the pain of human beings but pretends to be horrified by it.
If God truly is in the birth of a child, the devil truly is in the theft of it.
