Darkest Before the Dawn

(The following was written in the winter of 2005, several months prior to our due date.)

My wife’s belly is growing, and so are my fears.

What if I go nuts upon becoming a father? (It’s happened in my family before.) What if I fail to be patient? What if I’m just as selfish as a father as I am today? How will I survive seeing the truth about myself presented in the mirror of fatherhood?

Meanwhile, I’ve yearned for this moment – for seeing the hope and fear in my pregnant wife’s eyes, for learning that the reality I have inhabited till now was really Reality Lite. I’ve yearned to hold my own child, to laugh and cry together – in sickness and in health. I’ve wanted to learn that I can transcend the darkness of my own early years and be born again in the truth that I am a strong person, a strong man – strong enough to be a dad.

Miraculously, blessedly, my relationship with my own father is the strongest it has ever been right now. Dad has said he’s thrilled he’s being made a grandfather for the second time. (Emma, my younger sister’s child, was born in 1998). The rest of my family has been supportive, too. Even my mentally ill mother, who has been granted at least a partial reprieve from the psychic darkness that enveloped her before I was born, has had good ideas and joy to share with my wife and me.

So, why all the fear? Well, first, why not? Let me say honestly that terrorism is something I think about more than every week or two. Living in Rhode Island, it seems unlikely that my wife or child or myself would be the victim of an attack – but will the U.S. economy survive the next September 11? Will my wife, our child, and I have to live through worldwide depression akin to the 1930s? What about the astonishing, odd state of geopolitics during our time? Will my president conduct further preemptive wars in the name of freedom? What if my child explains that he or she was acting preemptively when doing some small act of violence at school? Speaking of misbehavior, what if my child gets in trouble a quarter as much in school as I did?

On to the literary and musical ambitions of yours truly (you know, the things that really matter). Should I sell my guitars now, stop submitting my songs to contests and publishers, or should I wait until the day after my child is born? Won’t it be obvious if I don’t cease the long adventure in self-punishment and rejection that my musical career has been that I am, by definition, a poor excuse of a father? Isn’t there some chance, meanwhile, that the wave of joy fatherhood lets loose in my life will be the last bit of energy I needed to make it in the super-competitive world of songwriting? Does this mean I’m prepared to use my unborn offspring as fodder in my personal creative wars? Could anything be more base?

What about my other pursuit – writing? Four unpublished books, hundreds of unpublished poems, and dozens of unpublished short stories do not appear to be the foundation for financial stability a young father might want to be building for his new family. Wouldn’t it be wise if I – finally – bit the bullet and became a lawyer? But, here again, isn’t it fully possible that the responsibility and depth afforded by fatherhood will drive home to me the reality of other people’s experience sufficiently to improve my character creation, my dialogue, and my narration so much that I finally taste the literary success I’ve coveted since reading “Crime and Punishment” at age 20?

(Thank God I didn’t know then what kind of suffering Dostoevsky endured in order to write his masterpieces.)

But, truly, enough about me. What I would love to hide from, what I have been hiding from until sitting down to write down these thoughts on a sunny, cold winter day, is that every single one of these fears is a smokescreen between myself and my central fear -- that something will happen to prevent my wife and me from becoming parents between now and July 21st.

Baby and me. How precious she is.

Harold Ambler 

Father and daughter