Welcome to the (Parent) Hood. Pt.2

For Part 1, click here.

A few months ago, I had poo all over my hands.

Let's give that some context.
​
I was in the parent's room at Macca's. 
It felt like there was poo all over the floors,
the walls,
the ceiling.
There was poo smeared up Noah's leg, on his hands, on his feet.
I needed back-up, badly.
​

​Every attempt I made to wipe that little bum only seemed to splatter the brown paint further in this parent's-room-turned-contemporary-art-exhibition. I had literally wrapped nappy wipes around Noah's finger-painting hands as a form of damage control. To make things worse, I had the nappy bag - and Sam's phone was in said nappy bag, so there was no calling wife to come and rescue me. 

Eventually she figured it out anyway, and found two whimpering messes in the Parent's room. In all the commotion, I think I had probably pooped my pants too.

This was what I expected before becoming a Dad. I'm sure there are fellas who would read that paragraph and silently nod, remembering back to their first multiplying poo-splosion. I don't want to overplay the hopeless Dad card (I am a fully capable parent and I have every intention of writing more about this in the not so distant future), but I always expected to learn some of this the hard way.

What I didn't expect  was to find myself driving home without my boy on his first night in the world.

I had planned to:
carry my child out of the hospital ridiculously cautiously
place him/her in their carseat ridiculously carefully
drive home ridiculously slowly
and spend any remaining hours of the night watching this little creature sleep (ridiculously soppily).

Instead,

"We're going to take your son now."

I could try and describe the visuals to accompany that sentence, but a picture paints a thousand words:

Scary stuff, right?

And one of the dudes who has rigged Noah up in this bad boy, gets down on his knee, looks my Sam in the eye and says: 

"We're going to take your son now."

He said other things. Kind things. He spoke to a new mother, with a sense of the gravity of this separation.
You've carried this life for 9 months. 
You just spent 16 hours in labour. 
This is your son. You gave him a name. He fed from your breast. 
But, he's having trouble breathing right now. 
And he needs more than this place can offer. 
 
I don't remember many of the exact words he said, but I'll always remember that one sentence:

"We're going to take your son now."

What do you do with that? You've been waiting for this moment, building it up in your mind, it's bigger than all your Christmases as a kid put together. Your first night as a family of three. Gone.

There's one spare seat in the ambulance.

You do the maths.

There's no way three of us are ending up in the same place tonight. 

And this was one of the biggest things I learnt in my first few hours as a Dad. 

My heart didn't split in half. It grew twice the size. But it stayed confined to one body, one location. These two humans are yours to love. How are you going to love them both well? Who needs you more in this moment? 

Your wife's sitting on the hospital bed, feeling faint, thirsty, hungry and anxious...
Your son's surrounded by voices he doesn't know, machines beeping, needles poking, fingers prodding, cold metal... 

Where do you stand? Who do you talk to? Which hand do you hold? 

This is love. It's strange and complex and full of beautiful aches. And you can't do it perfectly. You're already limited. And this is just the beginning.

Whilst my first night of being a Dad shattered all my expectations. It taught me more about love than I had anticipated. 

I am limited. I am vulnerable. I am frail.
I would do anything for my boy. 
I would do anything for my wife.

Changing a poo-splosion is nothing.

***

TBC
Next: Midwives vs Doctors: stuff you shouldn't say to someone in NICU.