When Justine and I started talking about having a kid, the topic of a birth plan came up. Justine wanted to have a home birth, and I wasn’t familiar with home births. My fears took over, and I announced with finality that there was no way we would ever do something that insane.
The more I learned about homebirths, the more comfortable I got with the idea. I knew Justine was raised in the house she was born in. A fact I’d typically bring up when explaining why we were insane enough to try to have our kid like cows. Justine accused me of volunteering our birth plan just to see the shock in people’s faces. I vehemently denied it even though I knew it was the very first thing I’d tell people after the pleasantries were over and we knew what the weather was doing that day.
One of the things that really got me around was the idea of receiving my baby into the world. An experience so intimate that it would be our private moment for the history of our family. Justine was bringing our baby into the world, and I was to receive it. That was the real idea that finally won me over.
I guess one more thing I should mention is that we didn’t find out the sex of the baby before the birth. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We are those hippies from the North Bay Area. But really, it didn’t matter to me. I would’ve really gone along for the ride either way. I would’ve been happy finding out, and I was happy not finding out. At the end of that day, you are getting a baby, and that’s an incredible gift. What sex the baby is, it’s an irrelevant fact. It won’t change if you observe it. We were waiting for him or her or them, with infinite anticipation.
People found it weird, but I think secretly they were fascinated by it. The moment they found out we didn’t know the sex, they would pull their telescopes and tarot cards out of their back pockets and make complicated calculations to find out what sex the baby would be.
Almost everybody predicted it was going to be a boy based on the alignment of the stars, what Justine enjoyed for breakfast, the direction of her belly, and where she was putting on the weight. The last topic is one that I never touched and floored me when people did display incredible courage and foolishness. Maybe they thought Justine was slow because she put the weight on her ankles but what they didn’t know is that she didn’t need to catch them or touch them because she knew she didn’t need to move a finger to make them feel excruciating emotional pain.
Only two people predicted that it was going to be a girl. And when you asked the people what they based their theories on, they would just say they had a feeling. So, not really reliable or science-based. None of it.
When our baby was born, I was preoccupied with welcoming her into the world and also comforting my wife through the experience. I didn’t really get to see its sex; I just grab the baby and put it on Justine’s chest. We just sit there looking at the baby and marveling at how beautiful and how ours it was. We speculated about how it would look, but once it was here, we couldn’t imagine it being anything else other than what it was. Someone in the room brought us out of our reverie when she shouted, “so what is it?” It referring to the sex of the baby. So we raised the baby a bit, and we welcomed our beautiful daughter, Jovie, into our new family of three.
There is a cultural assumption that men want boys. I think that is slowly changing. I don’t think it matters anymore. We want healthy babies, and that’s enough because we don’t have to worry anymore about who is going to make sure our coat of arms exists into the future.
But it can be uncomfortable at times for men to navigate common parenting moments with daughters. Like changing their diapers.
Recently my wife was quality-controlling my work because she says I can’t change a diaper in one take. I tell her we all have our methods and that I believe in minimal approximations. I start by closing it first, then I slowly open and close it several times until I have a fit that I believe my daughter would enjoy when she is discovering the world.
Now, we are at a time where my daughter is pointing at her vagina. Another uncomfortable moment for a father. So while my daughter was pointing and my wife was supervising, I was humor — which I do in uncomfortable situations — to reassure her I knew what she was pointing at: “yes, honey, that is your VA-giant.” “yes, honey, that is your va-jay-jay.” My wife finally snapped and shouted, “it’s a vagina! You have to call it a vagina!! Even if it’s uncomfortable to say.”
I’m not really uncomfortable with the word vagina. Look below. I type it like nobody’s business.
Vagina. Vagina. Vagina!
It’s not that I’m uncomfortable with the word. It’s just that growing up in Colombia; we always use more colorful language to describe genitalia.
Our moms referred to our penises as a Pajarito, which means little birdie. Thinking about it, it makes sense why Hispanic men tend to have issues with monogamy. If their penis is a little bird, you can only imagine that the vagina counterpart is the birdcage. It also explains why they love so much Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.”
But even in uncomfortable moments, I think of these moments with my daughter as fleeting. They marked the immense joy and warmth I feel when I hug my daughter with an undertone of sadness for the impermanence of each of her developmental stages.
Justine and I waited to have kids until we were a little bit older. Once we had Jovie, we would have parents approach us and say, “enjoy it because you don’t know how fast it’s done.” I appreciated that advice. I think about it constantly. I think that advice would’ve not stick if I was in my early 20s. But now that I’m older, I have experienced a little more pain, a little more loss; I can understand the value of the advice.
I think about the firsts, and I enjoy witnessing them. But I also think about the lasts, and there has been a lot of lasts already, even though my daughter’s not even two.
The last time she took a nap in my arms when she wasn’t bigger than a loaf of bread, the last time she didn’t fight a diaper change, the last time I was able to carry her around without feeling like my back was at the brink of breaking.
I know there will be the last time I will change her diaper. So I take every diaper change to talk to her, tickle her, to give her a fresh diaper so she can keep on exploring the world with a clean tushie even if it is uncomfortable for a father to change a woman’s diaper.
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Carlos Garbiras
A hopeless optimist sorting the deeply ingrained neurosis of a hypervigilant and topsy-turvy upbringing in Colombia.
Read more at garbiras.medium.com and instagram.com/garbiras
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Diana Polekhina on Unsplash
