A few years ago, at the end of my internship in pediatrics, I worked for a month in the nursery of a maternity ward. Every day, we gathered in a small hallway on the fourth floor of the hospital, in front of a huge glass wall overlooking a room full of newborns. We watched the nurses bathe and change them, then we entered the scene to perform our examinations and write up our reports.
When they started to cry, we would hold them in our arms to calm them down. All day long, the bassinets on wheels came and went in the room, lined up in a more or less anarchic fashion, like supermarket carts abandoned in a deserted parking lot.
Fatherhood, so close and so inaccessible
One fine day, on a fairly calm morning with only one delivery scheduled, we were making our rounds with the pediatrician, debating who would do the circumcisions and which infants needed phototherapy to treat their jaundice, when a nurse called on me. held out a baby. I started rocking him with one hand, while checking his vitals with the other.
I then resumed my round of examinations and my writing of reports. After lunch, I got down to signing exit slips, following the parents who were leaving the maternity ward, beaming (and terrified) at the little being nestled in the crook of their arms. Then my boss allowed me to leave early.
I got through the little traffic at the beginning of the afternoon without incident, and once I arrived home I ate a snack in front of a series, while waiting for my husband. When he returned, he asked me how my day was. GOOD. I stood up for a hug, threw myself into his arms, and burst into tears.
A part of me remained in that nursery. Fatherhood seemed both so close and so inaccessible to me that I was devastated. While hugging my husband, I still felt the weight of the baby I had carried a few hours earlier, and who had forced me to contemplate a life I didn’t think I deserved.
Financial, ethical and legal issues
If I waited until I was 27 to come out, it was partly because I didn’t want to give up the idea of having a wife. Today, at 33, I have learned to let go of this ghostly wife who has haunted my thoughts for a long time. I know now that she was nothing other than the embodiment of everything I risked losing by confessing my secret: a traditional marriage and family, and fatherhood, at least the image I was given. had always given it – a primary logic, which remained burned in my mind, according to which there cannot be a father without a mother, nor a mother without a father, nor children without both.
“There are other
2023-09-21 03:00:27
#York #Times #column #Modern #Love #deserve #father
