A little child will heal them
This night 18 years ago the most significant change in my life was about to occur. I received a phone call earlier that day and had left what I was doing and drove home. There had been a few false alerts previously so I had become at least familiar with the routine.
We had gone 6 days over the due date so any call now could be the call. I got Ree to the car and we drove to the hospital. They decided that as we were over the due date they would keep us. It would take another 24 hours before what was invisible would become invisible.
I was carrying tiredness as I waited on hospital chairs my mind fixated on this baby being born. During the nine of months of pregnancy, I had laboured over how the baby would be and how I would be as a father. I was wracked with self-doubt though regardless this baby was coming.
She was born at 15 55 to the sounds of Classic FM. It was a caesarian delivery and due to exhaustion, Ree was almost asleep when Cee came out. What an incredible moment when the invisible becomes visible as your baby is passed to you to look after. For the next 3 hours, Cee slept on my chest. I like to think of it as our bonding time.
It was during the pregnancy when 9 months just seemed so long that I began my first lessons in ‘living the day’. I still take daily lessons.
Cee has been many things though right now I think of her acting as a redeemer. I connected intensely with the pregnancy and her early years. I was looking for some sort of connection with these periods in my life. I wanted to know what it was like for me to be a baby in a womb, to be born, to be vulnerable, to be totally dependant on others. This was the closest I would ever be to it in my 29th year.
Somehow in being the care giver, I was healing myself of this period of my own life that I had no recall. That is why I speak of redemption there was something being redeemed. It was active with our interactions as father and child.
Babies have been conceived with the intention of taking from them to give what is deficient in a sibling. In my case, this baby was providing me with redemption without even knowing it.
So now she celebrates her 18th birthday and legally is an adult and I too celebrate that with God’s help, day upon day we got to this day. Maybe I am celebrating too the healing of my own inner child.
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