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Fathering Blind
Mike Heenan, San Mateo, CA
From Dads Behaving DADLY: 67 Truths, Tears, and Triumphs of Modern Fatherhood Copyright © 2014 Motivational Press. Reprinted with permission. By Hogan Hilling and Al Watts.
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When I wasn’t much older than my daughter is now, I was at my dad’s house for one of our every-other-weekend visits. Wandering the daunting hallway one morning, I hung a sharp right and burst, unannounced, through the door to his bedroom. There he was, on his knees like I’d seen him before in the pews; only here his God was an all-white powder in a Tony Montana mini-mountain on the razor-strewn nightstand.
That wasn’t my only memory of my father. He took me cat-fishing; the real kind. He took my cousin and me to the go-cart tracks to tear through the tire-lined course, lap after lap. He took me to see Rocky IV at the drive-in and The Last Starfighter and lots of other places. I loved the man to death despite my mother’s insistence he was “good for nothing.”
I approached the task of becoming a father some three odd years ago eager but basically flying blind. Where does the son of a deadbeat, or otherwise absent, dad look for a fathering model? What resource exists when you have hardly a single memory of how your father fathered you, save for some early outings and some later, concussive, head-butting? How do you know what to DO or DO DIFFERENTLY if you’ve never been exposed to how it’s done? How do you handle fathering blind?
The prospect of becoming a father was petrifying.
After nine months spent worrying and waiting, my skyrocketing, white-knuckled fear of fatherhood reached its zenith on the day my daughter came into this world.
Sixteen long hours into my wife’s guttural laboring, I too was steeped in sweat and letting unintelligible, senseless, sounds escape my face. I did my all to comfort her, to position her, to hold her, but the unbearable pain on her face was intensified by each new wince and assertion of her steely resolve. The panic-inducing vicissitudes of the torturous baby/mama heart monitor bottomed-out for the umpteenth time.
Alarms started to sound, and the vacuum of our birthing room was suddenly flooded with scurrying hospital workers. Phrases like “terminal emergency” and “trying too hard for too long” were tossed about by those in the know. I became even more terrified. Sheer panic gripped me as I watched my wife – my rock – getting strapped to a gurney and whisked off by a horde of doctors frantically trying to tie on surgical garb.
My memory gets foggy at this point, either a subconscious pain filter or an artifact of a past full of distances and substances. When I was finally tossed some scrubs and shoe covers, I was escorted to Emergency Surgery.
The door opened to the set of a horror movie. I saw blood-soaked tables and tools. I saw mad scientists’ bubbling beakers and bone saws and spools. I don’t know what I saw, but I pulled myself together enough to go behind the partition to hold my wife’s ghostly face and try to knead the fright from it. A few short moments later, and after whatever unthinkable things happened on the other side of that partition, I was called over to meet my daughter for the very first time.
There were no words to describe it.
There was only a sense that is almost a sound. It was like the sound the Presto makes when my wife has finished cooking rice and twists the top-valve, and the thick steam spews like Vesuvius and shoots to the ceiling. It was the sensation of a lifetime of fear, and it’s more recent evil twin, fear of fathering, flying from me the instant I pressed my daughter’s face to mine. It was the monumental release when I cut the umbilical cord and ushered her into a world of wonder; a world we would occupy together for a while, hand in hand for as long as she’d have me, but certainly far longer than my father and I had. She was finally here, and I was no longer afraid.
I realized I would only ever need her as my measuring stick. We would attempt, succeed and fail together in our respective roles, with nobody to tell us how it should be done, but, as I soon discovered, plenty of people out there who are willing to share their experiences with us. I would try not to dwell on my past or other peoples’ pasts. I needed only to look into her eyes to see we would share a roof and sing in the rain and pretend to visit uncharted planets and interpret their hieroglyphs.
My daughter is now three. She will not experience what I did as a child. I will give 100% of myself. Nothing is ever more important to me than being her dad and, because of her, I am no longer fathering blind.
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Mike Heenan is a doting dad of two daughters and a devoted husband of one superhuman Mrs. Heenan. An author, and Chief Content Creator at www.AtHomeDadMatters.com, Mike relishes the opportunity to be a stay-at-home-dad and, together with his girls, never misses a moment of this crazy little thing called life. Mike and his family live in San Mateo, CA.
Hogan Hilling is a nationally recognized and OPRAH approved author of 12 published books. Hilling has appeared on Oprah. He is the creator of the DADLY book series and the “#WeLoveDads” and “#WeLoveMoms” Campaigns, which he will launch in early 2018. He is also the owner of Dad Marketing https://dadmarketingconsulting.wordpress.com/, a first of its kind consultation firm on how to market to dads. He is also the founder of United We Parent, www.unitedweparent.com. Hilling is also the author of the DADLY book series and first of its kind books. The first book is about marketing to dads “DADLY Dollar$” and two coffee table books that feature dads and moms. “DADLY Dads: Parents of the 21st Century” and “Amazing Moms: Parents of the 21st Century.” Hilling is the father of three children and lives in southern California.
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Originally published in Dads Behaving DADLY: 67 Truths, Tears, and Triumphs of Modern Fatherhood Copyright © 2014 Motivational Press. Reprinted with permission.
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