A few weeks back my then pregnant wife told me that although she’s excited to see our son, she says she’ll miss him. She’ll miss being with him everyday. She’ll miss the thought that our baby is just curled up inside her, taking him wherever she goes.
I will never know how it feels to be pregnant, to have a person growing inside you, to go through all the hormonal changes and discomfort that a woman/mother experiences as she lets another person into this world. But I felt for her, I knew exactly what she meant. She loves our son and she wants to be with him, care for him in a way that we men as part of the male species will never get the chance to have.
And so I thought that’s just the way it is for parents. For a mother in particular, It was like an epiphany of what’s she’s going to feel twenty or thirty years later. When our son decides to live a life of his own, have his own family and leave the home he was curled, tucked in every night, nurtured and cared for all his life. Just like when he leaves his mother’s womb that hollow feeling of separating from the fruit of your loins will always be there. And its inevitable no matter how hard you try.
As a father, we will be feeling all these emotions too, like a giant wave that crushes to the ocean floor it will pound us, and leave us with that painful feeling of letting go. Yet it will always be incomparable to that link between a mother and her child. After all, we wouldn’t all be here if it weren’t for our mother, who carried us for nine (10 months actually) months, we bathe with her, went to places with her, ate with her. Everything that transforms us to what we are happened through her.
I can never describe in words what I felt when I first saw my baby boy, our baby boy. And I can imagine my wife feeling the same. He has finally arrived. We worry for him, we miss him when he is not in sight, that’s how it is and that’s how it will be. My mom always used to say, you’ll only realize how hard it is to become parents when you have kids of your own.
The journey begins, and our long wait is over. We can feel anxious about his future and that’s normal, we all are. We welcome him with open arms and all our love. “I can hardly wait to see you come of age, but in the meantime…” (John Lennon, Beautiful Boy) He is our baby boy.
He is our son.