a brief catalogue of mostly forgivable thoughts
SEAN MURPHY
Mostly, he thinks.
Watching his daughter—part angel, part human, part shark—attacking his wife’s distended breast with something more like fury than hunger. More greed than desire.
And, after he thinks all the obligatory (and true!) thoughts about how beautiful everything is (how beautiful the baby is, how beautiful his wife is, how beautiful this act is, how beautiful the world can be), there’s this: What about me?
Those breasts, which have become more like land mines than body parts, more fire than flesh, untouchable. Unthinkable. Too much pain, too little energy. This is for the baby, his wife, the new mother, says. Insists. The woman who is still his wife but suddenly much more (and, somehow, a little less).
And what is he, now? Something he can’t quite identify; something in between husband and father. There’s no word for this, is there?
Yes. At last, he understands, there is.
Life. It’s life is what it is. What he’s thinking about—and describing, and feeling—is life.
(Love? No. It is that, of course, but it’s something else.)
And then, unable to deny or suppress or feel bad about feeling it, there’s this: If he knew then how he’d feel now, would he still welcome this new life, this part of him, into the world? Their world?
Yes.
(Except when he wants to say No. When he feels angry or overwhelmed, and it’s entirely his right to have those types of feelings. Because he too has feelings, and he should be able to feel the same way so many other men must feel, at times; being tired, and emotional, and undersexed, and even insecure at not being wanted, not being needed. At least that’s how it feels, sometimes.)
What about lions? Think about how far we’ve come. As fathers, anyway. Mothers, throughout Nature, and with obvious exceptions, protect and nurture their offspring. It’s natural; it’s Nature. But fathers mostly keep their species going, offering their services as long as required (and often, that requirement ceases the minute the baby is born, or once they’ve deposited their sperm, without obligation or reward, and then on to the next biological adventure). And what of the lions who put nothing ahead of their compulsion to fuck and, when provoked, fight? If there are babies from another father hanging around, they’re fair game, and become collateral damage. It’s all instinct, part of the whole evolutionary dance.
So who can blame a human father for the occasional lapse? It’s not even a lapse, really; it’s an understandable impulse, owing to lack of sleep, maximum stress (itself a signal of compassion, evidence of love), and lack of attention. It’s not like you want to kill the baby, you just look at her and think: I made you. Or, I too was part of this. None of this is possible without me, you know. So why do I feel scorned? How come I seem so irrelevant?
What about his father? Think about how far he’s come. His father wasn’t even there the night he was born. Fathers, then, weren’t expected at the hospital. After all, they might be at work or pulling a second shift. Or having a medicinal beer or two at the local pub, no one judging, no one especially noticing. This is just how it was.
What about his mother? Even she didn’t breastfeed. It was a different era, in between old-fashioned lack of options (before there was formula there was what mothers made, nothing in between) and our back-to-the-future paradise of organic everything, where not breast-feeding your baby is only slightly more excusable than matricide. Back then most families made it up as they went along, by necessity, no questions asked. Lack of money meant lack of options which meant everyone did the best they could and doing your best was good enough.
What about him? When, exactly, did all this guilt become such an unavoidable part of the equation? What do you call that space in between being imperative and replaceable?
A human being. A man. A father.
And so, again: he thinks, what if?
If he knew then how he’d feel now…
Yes. Still, yes.Yes, of course. Yes, a million times. So much yes that a momentary no seems less caustic and almost like a respite, an inevitable, even healthy thunderclap in otherwise cloudless skies.
Yes. But it’s okay to say no sometimes. He’s only human. His wife, too. And, above all, the baby: part human, part alien, part of both of them. The sum total of everything they said they wanted and were, in part, put on this earth to do, just like the lions and all the mothers and fathers before them. Something that makes things like paychecks and townhouses and retirement and cars and careers and sex fall away like translucent drops of milk from a ragged and aching nipple.
Mostly.
Sean Murphy has appeared on NPR's "All Things Considered" and been quoted in USA Today, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and AdAge. A long-time columnist for PopMatters, his work has also appeared in Salon, The Village Voice, Washington City Paper, The Good Men Project, Memoir Magazine, and others. His chapbook, The Blackened Blues, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. He has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and served as writer-in-residence of the Noepe Center at Martha's Vineyard. He’s Founding Director of 1455 (www.1455litarts.org).