EPTThe conventional wisdom is that fathers love daughters and mothers love sons, and I actually found this to be very true in my case. My oldest is my daughter Sumåhi and she'll turn six next year. I have a strong bond and warm bond with her, whereas for my son I often dole out to him regular lessons in tough love. On the surface it may seem that the bonds between fathers and sons are difficult, but that doesn't mean that you cannot connect on a deeper level.
I’ve been going through all the photos I have of my son so far, watching him morph from a helpless blob on the bed, to a stoic Buddha who can finally control his neck, and finally his current form, super-dåggan-butt--scooting grabby hands. So many of the pictures are of him smiling, or were taken in anticipation of him smiling or just after he had smiled. In the early stages of both my children’s lives, smiles were so rare, and even if a lot of them were involuntary or accidental, they were sometimes the most precious possible moments.
For the first few months Akli’e’ was primarily a biological entity. Sure he was a cute biological entity, but he couldn’t communicate with me and actually couldn’t do much more than consume breast milk and produce feces and urine. For those first few months, while everyone expects you to have a close instant connection with your child, it’s very normal to wonder when that bond will finally arrive? When will it happen? At the start, you’re not even sure if your child can physically see you, much less know who you are or comprehend that it is a part of you. The smile is so crucial because it might represent the moment when your baby at last comprehends the world, and more importantly can finally see who you are. All of this reminds me of the first “official” time that my son Akli’e’ smiled at me.
When he was just three or four months old, we were having a family lunch at May’s restaurant in Tamuning, and somehow amidst all the baby passing, squirming and crying, Akli’e’ ended up in my lap. At that point in his short life, the closest bonds he had in the world were with his diaper (which would give him regular rashes) and his mother's breasts which gave him just about everything else. He hadn’t formed much of a bond with me yet. And so naturally, that afternoon I ended up looking into his eyes to see if there was some flicker in his eyes, to see if he had at least an inkling as to who I was in his life.
Both Akli’e’ and his older sister Sumåhi had these luminous round eyes which sometimes seemed to swirl with colors. As I stared into them, his eyes widened, and I wondered if we really did see more or if my face was just a jumble of shapes, lines and colors he couldn’t quite piece together yet.
Caught up in the moment, not sure what else to do, I began to sing. Just after he had been born a friend of mine had told me to listen to “Father and Son” by Cat Stevens, and even up until today I often find myself singing lines from that song when I’m holding my son in a particularly cute moment. It has become part of the soundtrack of my life as a father, since it captures both the beauty and pain of being a parent.
It is full of lines which I could have felt were deep in an abstract sense prior to becoming a parent, but after becoming a parent, feel like they are etched into the ventricles of the heart.
How can I try to explain, when I do he turns away again, it’s always been the same, same old story. From the moment I could talk, I was ordered to listen…
Parenthood is about doing your best to create a human being, to mold it, guide it, shape it, so that it can live a better life than you and take only the best parts on into the future. No matter what you do or try out, you will always fail, your child will disappoint you, will make mistakes, some of them the same as yours, and they will always find a way to rebel against you and curse you in the same way you cursed your own parents at some point.
After singing most of the song to Akli’e’, I looked again, deep into his eyes, praying for some recognition that he knew who I was and that somehow the song communicated to him our connection. A toothless smile appeared, one unmistakably for me. I smiled back. It was the kind of smile which magically creates tears at the corners of your eyes. I pulled him up to my face to give him a kiss. As I did, I could swear that bonds were slowly snaking around our forms, from this first precious connection. I wanted to sing to him again, the same song, every song I could think of to make him smile over and over again.
As I held him up I couldn’t help but notice a green-yellow shape peeking out from the edge of his diaper. I was about to laugh and reach to get a new diaper to change him, when my daughter, with perfect comedic timing, shrieked for all to hear, “Bula take’ guini!” or in English, “There’s plenty of poo here!”
I glanced down to where she was pointing to see my lap, my arms, my shirt, almost everywhere imaginable covered in a greenish yellow hue. Around the lunch table there was a mixture of laughs, groans and surprised yells.
I looked down at my son again, this time, comically angry, peering into his eyes hoping that now he understood not to ever do that again! And that’s when he smiled at me the second time.
