A substitute instructor teaches the breastfeeding class. She divides the students into two groups: moms on one side of the room, dads on the other. She gives each group a black marker and a piece of poster paper. She instructs the women to write a list of ways breastfeeding benefits the mother and the child. She asks the men to list how breastfeeding is good for the father. “Just the father,” she says. We don’t understand. One of the men suggests that what is good for the mother and child is also good for the father. The rest of us nod, each wishing he had said it first. The instructor, though, does not want this. She wants to know how breastfeeding benefits the fathers alone.

The women start writing immediately. Our appointed scribe holds the marker against the paper and waits for ideas. None come. We can’t think of anything. Eventually we write that breastfeeding is good for men because it is cheaper than buying formula. And that breastfeeding helps a new mother lose her pregnancy weight more quickly. Both reasons are petty and crass, and we know it, but we can’t think of anything else.

Our wives groan when we share our answers, and the instructor rolls her eyes as if we are all silly, sex-obsessed cheapskates. Typical men. I realize then that we have been set up. The instructor insisted on selfish answers so that she could rebuke us for being selfish. Later she scolds me for beginning a question with “when my wife is breastfeeding our baby” rather than “when we are breastfeeding.” “The father has a role to play in feeding too,” the instructor admonishes. She might as well wag her finger at me.

I don’t understand why, during their partners’ pregnancy, men are assumed to be reluctant buffoons. We’re treated as if we need to be strong-armed into taking part in the delivery and coerced into caring for our own children. Hospitals make me squeamish, and I decide early on that I don’t have the mettle to cut the umbilical cord much less “catch” the baby as he emerges. When I promise Moonira I will stand behind her during the delivery, I mean it both figuratively and literally; I don’t want a front row seat.

But I want to be there. I can’t imagine being anywhere else.

5.

I don’t remember what I’d done to make my father tie me up in the garage. He stood me against a metal support post, pulled my hands behind me and lashed my wrists together. He would pour a new concrete floor that week, and I recall the smell of dry cement and a heap of gravel in the place where he usually parked his orange Chev Malibu. I would inherit the car when I turned 17. At the time, though, I was 4 years old.

I waited until he climbed the stairs back into the house before trying to escape. He hadn’t tied me tightly and I didn’t need to struggle long before the knots unravelled. When I felt the rope drop against the back of my bare ankles, I knew he tied me loose on purpose. Despite his threats, he hadn’t intended to keep me bound to a pole in the garage all night long. I remember feeling indebted to him for this shred of mercy, and thankful he didn’t switch off the light.

I last spoke to my father 13 years ago at the Calgary airport. I was departing for a year-long trip to Africa. I wanted to volunteer abroad, to find stories to write and to get away from my dad for a little while at least. I said goodbye before boarding the plane and he cried like he would never see me again. While I was in Ghana, he hit my mother for the last time. They were divorced by the time I returned. I’ve never felt more relieved.

I listen to our baby’s heartbeat at the prenatal clinic, and remember the time my sisters and I urged my father to quit smoking. He looked down at us and said that cigarettes were all he had worth living for. I look up at the ultrasound screen, see my baby’s nose and forehead. His tiny glowing bones. And I think that all I want is to be a good dad.

6.

Moonira moans and cries a little. Her face tightens like a fist. When the contraction passes she opens her eyes and says to me, “I want an epidural.”

I laugh out loud, not because I don’t empathize, but because we’re standing in our condo. “I’ll check the spice cabinet,” I joke, “but I think we are fresh out of epidurals.”

We are not supposed to be having a baby today. Our due date comes a week from now, and yesterday Moonira’s doctor said she showed no signs of delivering early. Moonira felt mild contractions through the night, but we assumed these to be a sign of false labour—another term we’d learned—rather than a signal our baby was en route. Moonira even went to work this morning. Now, as her pain surges and the pace of her contractions quickens, we realize this might be it.

Our prenatal classes taught us not to rush to the hospital at the first sign of labour, an error many first-time parents make, because staff won’t admit a woman until her labour hits the halfway mark. Heather, our doula, advised going out for dinner at this stage. “Once she’s in the hospital, Moonira won’t be allowed to eat. So you might as well enjoy your last chance for a good meal together while you can. Besides, it’s fun to freak out the waiter by telling him you’re having a baby.”

Moonira’s labour, though, hurtles forward too quickly for last-minute dinner dates. Terror shines from her eyes each time a contraction crashes through her. I call Heather. She is driving to Lethbridge for a doula convention but turns the car around on the highway.

She tells me I need to help Moonira breathe and focus through the contractions. I stand in front of my quaking wife and try to get her to look into my eyes when the spasms come. She won’t listen to me. She can’t. I lose her to the pain each time. I coax her into the shower where the hot water might slow down her contractions. Moonira leans against the tile, her back bent. Her neck strains and stiffens. I stand outside the tub and watch the body I’ve loved for eight years turn to fury. There is nothing beautiful about this.

The water offers no relief. I call Heather again and she tells us to go to the hospital. As I drive, Moonira wails between her whimpering in the backseat. Every bump rattles her, and I can’t decide whether to drive very fast or very slow. For a moment, I forget where the hospital is. I ask Moonira for directions, but she cannot answer. She trusts that I can get us there, that I can handle this much at least. Arriving feels like victory. I deliver Moonira into more capable hands than my own.

We check in just after seven in the evening. The details of the following hours blur into each other and defy chronology in my memory. I cannot remember what happened when. At some point, a doctor—or maybe Nikki, our nurse—attaches Moonira to an IV bag filled with antibiotics. Later someone else taps Moonira to an epidural analgesic. The doctor breaks Moonira’s water. Someone wraps a belt of sensors around her torso, and places an electrode on the baby’s scalp. A machine narrates Moonira’s contractions on white ribbon that curls out onto the floor. I watch our baby’s heartbeat on the monitor, grow anxious at each rise and fall, and realize I love someone I know only by cable-borne biometrics and foggy ultrasound scans.

It must be near two in the morning when the doctor folds down the foot of Moonira’s bed, kneels between her legs and tells her it is time. Heather holds a camera at arm’s length over the doctor’s shoulder and snaps the sort of photos Moonira and I will never show anyone or even look at ourselves. Other technicians arrive, their faces hidden behind blue surgical masks, in case our child needs emergency treatment on delivery. When the number on the machine signals a cresting contraction, Heather urges Moonira to “push,” to “focus,” to “go, go, go.” Nikki, in her sweet West African accent, tells Moonira she is doing amazing. I don’t know what to do or say, so I press my head against Moonira’s and parrot Heather and Nikki’s words into Moonira’s ear. I feel foolish for this mimicry. There must be more I can do.

Later, I ask Moonira if she even knew that I was there. “Of course. I felt you beside me the entire time. Your head on mine. I cannot imagine doing that without you. You were the most important person in the room to me.”

“Hardly,” I say. “Between the doctor, Heather and the nurse, I was the least necessary person there. I didn’t really do anything.”

“You gave me peace. I needed to know that if anything happened to me, you would be there with our baby. That if he couldn’t be with us, he would be with you.”

7.

I attended classes and read books. I learned the mechanics of back labour and the action of intravenous pitocin. Experts taught me all about breech birth, water birth and afterbirth. Nobody, though, told me how I was supposed to feel when I first saw my child. The classes and manuals offered no instruction. I assumed my first emotion would be joy. I thought happiness would wash over me.

But in this precise moment, when the doctor lifts my son up from Moonira’s last push and places him in her arms, I feel only astonishment. Wonder. The sight of my little boy bewilders me. I can’t believe what I see. Suddenly, there is a baby in the room. And he is mine. Suddenly, there is a father in the room. And he is me.

I am the first to say “It’s a boy.” The words erupt from me, and when I hear myself I am surprised how much it matters that I am the first to say it. That my first declaration as a father announces our child is a boy. Moonira, though, is the first to say his name. “Hello, Amedeo,” she sings to our wet and wiggling son. “Hello, Amedeo.”

We named him after my mother’s father. I’ve known my entire life that I would name a son Amedeo, and I suspect a part of me wanted a boy just so I could give him this name. I admire my grandfather. He was born in rural Italy in the 1920s. Mussolini forced him into a uniform during the Second World War, and he fought in Italy’s doomed North African campaign until the British took him to London as a prisoner. There, a Nazi bombing raid broke his back. After the war he walked across Europe to his hometown, where he married my grandmother. They had three daughters, but he left them when they were still young girls to find work in Calgary. He laboured for two years before earning enough to bring his family over the sea.

My grandfather is gentle and honourable and brave. He is the kind of father I want to be.

8.

Amedeo’s middle name is Ihsan. It is an Arabic word that means “to do beautiful things.” I will teach Amedeo Ihsan to walk and I will teach him to wrestle. I will show him the spring crocuses that bloom on Nose Hill. I will teach him to read, and together we will read about dinosaurs. We will toss pebbles into rivers. I will show him how to drive, and to shave, and to knot a necktie, and to open a bottle of wine without breaking the cork. I will carry him on my shoulders. He will infuriate me and frighten me. Make me proud and make me crazy. I will write stories for him and about him. Together, we will write postcards home from Africa where we will travel to see the Sahara. Together we will ride bicycles. Together we will do beautiful things.

---

Marcello Di Cintio was the Markin-Flanagan Writer in Residence at the U of C, 2009–2010. He lives in Calgary with his wife and son.

---

Subscribe to Alberta Views today and receive 10 issues a year!

If this or any other feature in Alberta Views inspires comment share your views with us.
Email us at: letters@albertaviews.ab.ca

or write to us at:
Alberta Views
Suite 208, 320 – 23rd Avenue SW
Calgary, AB
T2S 0J2
Canada