On Entering Fatherhood

My son, my first child, will be born in a few weeks. I still grapple with what the event will mean to me, and, more generally, what the birth of a human means. I look at Sahar, in the full, round glory of her pregnancy, in awe of the simple fact that her body is capable of this. This body that I have come to know so well over the past eight years, its grace, its sensitivities, its blemishes, has transitioned into this new state, this state between states. Her body is somewhere between Sahar and A., between one and two, between female and male. I see her snap at her belly from time to time when he decides to press his toes into her ribs or presses too vigorously on her bladder. To refer to what I’m looking at as “Sahar” or as “Sahar and A.” seems a gross oversimplification. The state of this creature lies somewhere in between what we typically consider the identities of human beings.

I’ve been thinking a great deal about Khalo1 Adel and my grandmother. My relationship with both developed significantly during the year I spent in Egypt. My grandmother suffered an infection after major intestinal surgery, so I quit my job and spent the latter six months of my stay taking care of her and tending to the affairs of her house. Khalo Adel was triplegic, bed-ridden, only had the use of his right arm. The days took on a regular, cyclical rhythm. I would wake my grandmother, have her take her medicine, walk her to Khalo Adel’s room. He would already be playing solitaire on his computer. I would make coffee for the two of them and bring my grandmother the newspaper. She would then retire to her bed and do the crossword puzzle. Khalo Adel and I would watch old Egyptian plays and quote the funny lines to each other. She would receive treatments for the infection, often painful, in the late morning. In the afternoon, after lunch, I would nap with her. She would sometimes roll over and sleep on my shoulder. The evenings were quieter. I would drink gin alone on the balcony after they had fallen asleep.

I received the news of Khalo Adel’s passing over the phone from Khalto Lola. I was living in Montreal at the time. My reaction was one of immediate, visceral rejection. I could not accept that this human being had come to an end, that it is possible for all that a human being is to simply end.

My grandmother’s passing a few years later was quieter. I felt a similar rage, a similar rejection of the situation, but it wasn’t as raw, as overwhelming. Perhaps I had become more acclimated to this reality, if no more accepting of it. I did, however, as Ivan Karamazov put it, “humbly return my ticket”. I had been wrestling with the idea of god for a time, or more broadly with the idea of a universe that was conscious or at the very least provided some meaning. As I mourned my loss, all of that very comfortably slipped away. It all seemed unnecessary, burdensome, ugly even. For a conscious universe to build us as creatures who feel this intense love for one another, only to tear us away in the end, would be incomprehensibly cruel. Without that consciousness, however, a very different story emerges. It becomes an incredibly improbable trick of fate that we are even able to feel that love to begin with, however temporary it might be. The story shifts from a cruel master toying with his creation to one of two humble creatures in this vast emptiness, finding warmth in each other’s love for a few precious moments.

With this underlying philosophy as my foundation, I am now faced with the birth of my son. I reject that human beings must end, and similarly, I cannot grasp that they begin at some point. The little I know of embryology explains the mechanics of it, the formation of cells, their folding to create our organs. But somewhere in that process the sensibility that has a favourite song, a favourite food, loves its grandmother beyond measure, rejects her death, will be born. Intellectually, I understand that complex systems can emerge from simple processes. But that there exists a path from modest cells folding in reaction to chemical signals all the way to a personality that loves the poetry of Szymborska and hates chopped liver, is a phenomenon well beyond the grasp of my meager human brain.

Alain Badiou describes an “event” as a moment where some latent, hidden, marginalized part of a given situation bursts onto the scene and forces a transition to a new, transformed reality. Intuitively, the beginning of a new human seems such an event, but if so, on which hidden, marginalized aspect of our situation is it founded? A possibility that seems compelling to me is the understanding that all of us are seeds for other human beings, and conversely, all of us are of other human beings. This point of view tends not to be at the forefront of our conception of ourselves, particularly in more individualistic societies. Sahar is in a fluid state right now, somewhere between herself and a more and more fully formed A. She is a wave in a body of water feeding into the next across the surface. 

From a broader perspective, one might see this body of water as the entirety of humanity, with one generation giving rise to the next as it subsides, moving forward in time. I find this perspective deeply comforting, as it offers an alternative to seeing human beings as beginning and ending, or at the very least makes those terms less absolute. The love I feel and have felt is no less precious or rare, no less cruelly temporary. Its loss is no less painful, but perhaps less complete. I am of that love, and my son will be of that love through me. We are all, as human beings, connected through this process and others like it, of the generations that came before, creating the generations to come, in a perpetual movement that provides us with just enough warmth in our corner of this vast, cold universe.

1. Khalo is a term used in Egyptian Arabic to address a maternal uncle, and Khalto is used to address a maternal aunt.