“She’s wet.” The nurse said as she grabbed my daughter from my wife. Penelope Blake Jacobi, my first child, was not responding as she could when she came into the world. She was quiet as a mouse. The nurse took Nellie and placed her on what appeared to be a table similar to the ones in the NICU. “Her oxygen is low. It needs to be at this level” she said to me while pointing to a chart that indicates what a baby’s blood oxygen level should be at according to their duration post-utero. Nellie was not in the appropriate range. Eventually, my little girl received an oxygen mask to aid her respiration. I learned quickly that “wet” meant her lungs contained fluid, hindering her ability to breathe.
“Alright, she’s there now”, the nurse said after what felt like an eternity. My daughter was still silent. But, according to all the health professionals in the room, she was going to be okay. She would eventually let out the howling cry we desired. The whole ordeal only lasted a few minutes, but those few minutes changed me forever. I learned what it meant to beg. I begged like a famished dog for the triune God to protect my child. I have begged for good grades, begged for mercy, begged for justice, but I have never begged like that.
The Fire of Fatherhood
Fatherhood changes you. It’s one of the most radical, emotional shifts I have ever experienced. You are still the same person, but your emotional capacity amplifies thrice over. Young, single men are commonly known to society for their fire; their burning hunger for success, their preternatural ability to out-labor, and their incredible capacity of vigor. This all turns out to be a smolder compared to the fire of fatherhood. A father’s love for their children is a grand inferno, one that rages at the slightest sense of a threat to their offspring.
I’d say fatherhood is exactly that—you are set on fire for your children. Your emotions broaden and intensify. While protective rage can light at any second, so, too, does fatherhood balm you. You become quick to rescue, to comfort, and what were once inconvenient cries from others’ children become sympathizing pleas. During the height of the recent Israel-Palestine bombings, I came across a video of a Palestinian father lying next to his dying infant. The man’s body was blown to bits. But he managed to reach his hand out for his infant one last time before his soul left this world. The man’s last moments were filled with anguish and unspeakable torment—torment not stricken by the shrapnel and bullets in his body but by the sight of his dead child. I would have scrolled past the video with, admittedly, only a brief moment of sorrow before becoming a father.
Now, the video burns in my brain. In some distant way, I can understand what the man experienced right before his death. He experienced Hell while still on earth; A stare into his dead child’s eyes. Every father has pondered what horror that is. And yet, while staring into the abyss of darkness, I know that man would have traded places with any molten goblin in the center of the earth to have seen his child breathe.
The Towering Knight
I suppose there is some teleology behind fatherhood. This striking of the match on the soul, initiated by holding your child for the first time, must be God’s way of christening the becoming of a father. I’d venture to say Providence is preparing men for what they must do as their newly found calling. The capacity of unbridled rage; It is needed for protecting. The sensibility of sympathy; Loosened so that a man can feel, experience, and relate to their child’s woes. Hunger for the means to provide; A famine given by God to prompt a man to labor their hands day and night. The last of these augmented sensibilities is my most unfavorable. It is an incredible feeling to come home after a long day’s work to see your child’s beaming face. To them, you’ve conquered the world, and have come back from slaying whatever is out there. You’re the reason they have clothes they can sleep in. But the worst feeling in the world is when you know you cannot live up to the shining knight they’ve come up with in their mind. You are, really, not what your child thinks you are. He, the shining knight, towers over you while you lay in bed at night. Maybe one day you could fill his boots.
Hope
There is hope. It seems, to me that the Good Lord’s fatherly christening provides us dads with a soul that is capable of nearly anything when our children are at stake. A young buck may be able to outwork you, dad, when you both clock in tomorrow. But when it gets really tough, things are falling apart, and showing up isn’t as easy as it once was—will he? Lord knows dad will. Dad has no choice. He is set on fire.
“…and in the wilderness, where you have seen how the Lord your God carried you, as a man carries his son, all the way that you went until you came to this place.” —Deuteronomy 1:31
