This week I will make this pithy. It’s about fatherhood. I will explain why if you stay around long enough. Every 7.50am I usually open the back door to let my little girl in the car. She always sits at the back, like she is a monarchy and I’m the servant. And she never opens her own door; such mundane acts are beneath her. She is a lady after all. So in her dapper blue uniform – complete with a striped tie that is always crooked – she stands back and let me reach for the door. Then she climbs in and perch herself at the back with her small legs dangling at the edge of seat in that fashion that always warms my heart. Sometime she talks incessantly on the way to school, other times she doesn’t. When she doesn’t I always believe it’s because she got a lot on her mind, 3yr olds have a lot in their minds, weighty issues, like differentiate the color red from blue. Whether I’m spoken to or not depend on how she wakes up. She is a woman after all. My life seems to revolve around her moods. I like the days she is in a good mood; she jabbers on about something or the other. Sometimes she sings her nursery hymn in such off key fashion. I always switch off the radio when she’s in the car for those ten minutes and listen. I love those times because those are the only times I have fully, away wholly from the missus and the help, the two people who she is insanely attached to. Our conversations are inane.
“What is that?”
“That’s a lorry.”
“Lolly.”
“No, lorry.”
“And that?”
“That’s a very big man.”
“He is carrying what?”
“Apart from the potbelly?”
(Raising her voice) “He is carrying what?”
“A big bag.”
Pause.
“I want a lollipop.”
“Funny you should mention that, me too.”
“Will you buy me a lollipop?”
“ Yes.”
“Now?”
“Do you promise to move out?”
“I want a lollipop!”
“After school.”
“Do you know the twinkle twinkle song?”
“No. I don’t listen to Lady Gaga.”
“Me I know the twinkle song.”
“Can you sing it?”
(She sings it, off-key. A song about stars or something.)
“What is that?”
“That’s matatu.”
“And that?”
“Another matatu.”
“And this?”
(Slowly) “That’s my head.”
So it goes on and on. It’s senseless and directionless and it hardly ever goes anywhere, this banter. But I love it, it’s better than when she isn’t talking to me. When the car is silent and she sits at the back, brooding and ignoring me. Those days I feel
lost and I miss her and wish she would say something, anything; hell even hit me over the head with a magazine. Your child can evoke such deep and alien feelings in you, such profound feelings that will horrify you by their ability to draw out your vulnerability.
But here is the thing, her school is one of those schools where when you pull over a staff member runs and opens your car door, retrieves her from the car and walks her to her class. I really love that, if they scrapped that I would pay extra in her fees to have it back. It makes me feel that they find her as important as I do. Yes, we long certified that I’m superficial. Anyway normally just before she steps out, she stands up, leans between the seats, holds the back of neck awkwardly with her small adorable hands and quickly kisses me on the left cheek before disembarking.
Now my little girl is a sloppy kisser, which is understandable because (thankfully) she only has her dad to practice on hehehehe. So when she kisses me, she normally leaves some saliva on my cheek. Here is a part you guys won’t understand at all. When I drive out of her school I’m normally deeply fixated on that speck of saliva on my cheek. Conscious of it. Deeply so. Almost obsessed with it. I never wipe it off. I leave it there; feeling it, feeling that side of my cheek grow breezy when the wind blows on it. Feeling her lips there; small, soft and innocent, lips that I helped create which in essence makes them my lips puts me in a place of pride. And so for the moment before it all dries up (and it does very quickly) that saliva becomes a staggeringly large metaphor of fatherhood for me. And these seemingly trivial and intangible moments define what being a father to me. And they are many as they are poignant.
I’m writing this because a friend of mine is expecting a baby in five months. Or rather his girlfriend is. And he’s anxious. No, he’s freaking scared. So scared that he swears he sometimes hears a baby crying. I assured him that can only stop when he goes easy on the weed. Anyway we had a lengthy online chat last week, with me making him see the cool side of fatherhood and him trying not to pee in his pants. A grim chat. It felt like I was convincing him to donate his kidney. In short he feels he’s not ready to be a father even though he’s turning 32yrs in Dec. I laughed when he told me that. Anybody who can wear a condom in darkness is ready for fatherhood. I’m just saying. He feels like his “freedom” will be curtailed, he feels that he will lose his single friends, he feels he will stop being “cool”, he feels he’s screwed. In short, he told me the timing sucked and he was thinking of bailing. Yes, take for the hills and never come back down.
I figure there are many like him out there, fathers in waiting. Young. Dreamy. Scared. Clueless. Anxious. Lost. I figured that a little tender story like the one I have shared up there might give them the strength not to flee before the EDD (Expected Date of Delivery). Thing is nobody is ever ready for fatherhood. Fatherhood is mostly thrust at us. That’s the truth. No guy sits in a bar and says, in March ama make her pregnant. I’m yet to meet a guy who admits that he had a roadmap for fatherhood. If you are a father in waiting and you have gone through those dull lamaz classes but still feel anxious, I have a message for you. You are screwed. Hehehe, no I’m kidding. You will be fine. You really will be.
The one major consolation is that the bar on fatherhood is so regretfully low that all you need is to apply yourself a little more and you will be seen as a good father against the societal yardstick. So Danny boy, keep your shorts on, there are a few things scarier than fatherhood. I can’t think of any now, but I’m sure they are there.