Rap Dad by Juan Vidal

Author:Juan Vidal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

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JUST OVER A YEAR LATER, I learned that something I’d long fantasized about, something I’d hoped might disrupt and cancel my Sadness altogether, was to come true. There was life growing inside my wife’s belly; I was going to be a father. After the initial rush of joy had subsided, after we’d told our families and dear friends and listened to their kudos and their well-wishes, I was alone on our small porch. I thought about my friends, past and present. I thought about every father I’d ever come across in my young life. And I thought about what my father had said in the dream—about his passion for sons and daughters. If he’d truly ever held that passion, in a dream or otherwise, and could still abandon a wife and three boys, who was to say I wouldn’t someday do the same? Ma always told me how much of my father she saw in me. My short temper, my propensity toward conflict. Who’s to say I wouldn’t break under the strain of this brave new world? Would I stumble into the wrong dive and take up with some broad, leaving my family behind to carve their own trail? This is not to say I wasn’t thrilled by what I perceived as an answered prayer. But doubt slowly crept into my gut. I carried it around the way my wife clung to joyful anticipation.

On April 13, 2008, our first son was born in our apartment. He was born at home because people like my wife, who were raised in the Midwest, are an odd bunch. Anyhow, home births have been the natural mode of delivery since the dawn of humankind. It took sixteen hours from the time our midwife arrived to the time I cradled my son in my arms. The ordeal was drawn out and frightening in a number of ways. For a few long minutes—due to my wife’s bleeding from having torn—I was tormented by the possibility of becoming a single father. Our midwife remained collected throughout the birth. She stitched up my wife and put a stop to my worry. At first, even the thought of a home birth was troubling to me, and now that initial apprehension seemed justified. I, nonetheless, wanted to support this woman in however she was most comfortable expelling a human life from her body, so that’s what I did. Frightening as it was, it worked out in the end.

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