Enjoy the Process

Category: Fatherhood

  • Good to Discover

    Newborn on a plane, first time flying high
    Scared this might be the worst
    But it’s not like being on a kite

    Sad, frustrated, helpless when she’s crying,
    Wondering what can I do to alleviate the pain
    How can I make everyone gain

    Finding joy with the other one
    She knows what to do
    Movies, snacking, sketching,
    She’s self sufficient, it’s the truth

    Most of the pain is inside my own head
    Most of the insecurity rests there
    Is the man next to them okay
    But mommy has the best care

    The good in people shines,
    A one minute distraction and hold
    A blanket covering over her feet
    It’s the sweetest thing to behold
    and especially to receive

    Humanity redeemed itself on this seemingly haunted ride
    Instead it turned out to be filled of joyful surprises
    I am beginning to know

    Don’t get stuck in your own head
    Take an honest look around
    There’s good waiting to be discovered
    It can be found

  • Useless, Frustrated, Sinful

    When people ask, “How is it being a father?,” I wish I can respond with these three words. However, because I want to avoid quizzical looks and long drawn out conversations, I would give in to the typical excitement and happiness that people have for our newborn.

    My daughter was born about one month ago and never have I felt time pass by so fast. It is only now in this brief respite of quietness that I am forcing myself to reflect and not vegetate with Brooklyn 99.

    Without a doubt, once our daughter came out of my wife’s womb, it had to be one of the most magical experiences ever—minus the brief moment of extreme frustration towards my mother-in-law for telling me to look at her phone camera a certain way.

    It is interesting how labor is mostly associated with the movie scene pictures of the woman yelling and screaming with her legs hoisted up. It doesn’t prepare people for the twenty hour process, perhaps a reason why the instant gratification culture prefers to avoid natural births.

    Nonetheless, whilst my wife labored laboriously, I could not help but feel useless for most of the early portion. In fact, at one point I felt quite bored just sitting next to her, waiting and resting with her until the next contraction and bout of pain. I refrained from trying to “capitalize” the time by reading a book or something and joyfully waited, massaged, and breathed with her.

    Then came the intense, active labor, where everyone had differing opinions to offer—take the drugs, go all natural, don’t look down there, watch the whole show, expect her to cuss her head off at you. Looking back, it took a lot of butt and hip massages, warm showers, deep breathing, water feeds, and a lot of encouragement, and then everything is instantly forgotten. The literal sweat, blood, and tears, agony, defeat, persistence, strength, courage, weakness, hope—all describe the amazing woman my wife is as she climbed through one of the toughest experiences of her life. And while I could not be more amazed by her, the existential thoughts going through my mind at the moment were something along the lines of this is not right and wow was pregnancy worth it?

    But as I said, then the magic happens and what seemed like a baby that refused to come out, all of a sudden slivers out and these thoughts and feelings are shuffled underneath the amazement, joy, awe, and wonder. And while most arduous journeys in life that are conquered have an end and come with a sense fulfillment, the extreme process of labor is quickly shuffled underneath taking care of a newborn.

    People’s responses are expected—precious, adorable, cute. And all the congratulations, smiles, gifts, messages, all the happiness and joy are genuine and true, however like with most things in the modern life the scale leans so heavily on a positive-only response, that it feels wrong to be frustrated and useless.

    And those sentiments are only the tip of the iceberg, trickling down from the labor mountain, while the real ugly stuff is festering underneath all the attempts to match people’s expectations of what it ought to be like to have a newborn.

    Society has taken some steps forward, such as offering the P.U.R.P.L.E. crying handbook and identifying and labeling a new mental health issue of postpartum depression. But what about dealing with things like a lack of love for the newborn? Lack of patience is probably a top-seller, followed up by a lack of gentleness thus the need for a handout to inform broader society not to shake their babies out of frustration. But rather than normalizing these “typical” responses, I am oddly aware of how evil I can be—or to Christianize it, sinful.

    When people hear on the news of abandoned children and are horrified, I have a small taste of understanding why individuals would do that. The amount of sacrifice it takes, the amount of love to pour on a newborn is not something anyone or any learning can prepare you for. And while some of this is understandable and “tolerable” sin, God and I know some of the even more wicked passing thoughts that cross my mind, and some of the fleeting anger, and as Jesus would say, is on a scale of murder.

    I expected this major life change would come with its challenges and hurdles. It is not the diaper changing and adjustments to our living that ever worried me. It was knowing that with every major challenge and struggle in life, comes a deeper awareness of self, comes with a deeper confrontation with values, personal and societal, it comes with new tensions on old and new relationships.

    There is no doubt that I love my daughter. There is without a doubt a deep sense of gratitude for her life, period, as well as how well-behaved and how happy she is. There is so much happiness and joy to see my wife becoming more whole and complete as she was meant to be a mother. There is without a doubt an immense love growing, beyond my own capacity.

    But it is challenging. There are many times frustrations if not checked quickly can fester into something much more toxic. There are many times where I feel useless, which I also understand can lead to depression. There are many times where my evil, wicked heart and mind is revealed, and damn it is ugly to have to face.

    It is difficult, but every new waking moment with my daughter comes new joys and I forget the hyper-selfish, gluttonous, dependent, whiney, needy, baby that she is. It is amazing that there is a capacity within me to love her in that regards. It amazes me even more that there is a God who does the same for me, for the world that continues to choose to live in that hyper-selfish, gluttonous, dependent, whiney, needy state.

    How I long for the day where there will be no more tears.

  • The Fragility (and Hope) of Life

    Where to even begin…

    I remember, what seems to be a distant past now, my wife and I talking about having a child. Young and naïve, yet we both “knew” that our time had come to start trying. After weighing out multiple factors, we both agreed that it would be best. More often than not, we heard how difficult it is to get pregnant and that it takes multiple attempts. Some, unfortunately, are unable to even have children. Yet for us, all it took was one try and two weeks later, we were both hovering over three pregnancy tests, just to make sure we were 100% certain.

    And what an onslaught of emotions and thoughts the news brought to us and all the close people around us. For many, it was joyous news. For others, a surprised yet distant congratulatory gesture. As for myself, despite agreeing with my wife to have a child, there was a mixture of emotions. Perhaps it was the brevity between discussing and conception? Perhaps it was a revelation into my heart’s honest desires? Over time, the confusion settled into acceptance and anticipation for an uprooting of what I currently knew as life. Although I was more distant from the child, other fathers assured me that it is “normal” for guys to be more distant than the mothers carrying this new and fragile life.

    Fragility

    I recently realized that I previously viewed life as a mere biological process. There is indeed a deeper intimacy when making love, but the process of creating life to me was male sperm, female egg, fusing together to make an embryo, housed in a mother’s womb, nurtured until the time of birth. Little did I know how fragile this life can be: the heartbeat seen at only seven weeks, a loud, rapid, thump heard and seen in the ultrasound; the development from an acorn into an avocado size fetus, with visible head, arms and legs, moving and pumping. These moments of seeing the actual baby was when my heart and mind jumped within, in amazement at how this life could be living, forming, and growing in my wife’s little tummy.

    Sixteen weeks in, we were hoping to find out the gender. However, the baby was an active one, squirming around, not giving us a chance to see clear results. Thus, we were informed we would have to wait until 20 weeks, knowing that the progress of growth was completely normal and on track. And then on July 25th, 2016, news more shocking than the first time my wife told me she was pregnant was shared with us.

    “I’m sorry to tell you this, but your baby did not make it.”

    Confusion. Shock. Sadness. Relief? Concern. Worry.

    The emotions and thoughts at that moment are… Unspeakable. It is one thing if there were complications ahead of time. It is one thing if it was in the first trimester when the probability is higher. It is one thing if you don’t post on Instagram a food belly sharing all the hope and anticipation of starting a family, only a couple weeks before finding out. Unspeakable.

    Yet over the coming weeks, we had to speak. We had to speak with family, who had a mixture of responses. Some were supportive, some were difficult. We had to speak with doctors and administrative assistants to figure out how to handle this fetal demise (FD), a term we became very acquainted with. We had to speak with each other, making sure we were doing alright, making sure, without really knowing, that everything will be alright.

    The next week after would have to be one of the most difficult times of my life. Not only did I have to bear the news of losing a child, but I had to see my precious wife go under, what should have been a simple one-day procedure, an intense recovery in the ICU. I had to manage family communications and temperature during this process. I had to make sure that my wife would believe that everything was okay, while masking the knowledge of reading clinical studies on the mortality rate of disseminated intravascular coagulopathy (DIC) for second trimester FD. What seemed like ages, was a mere handful of days. And the next couple weeks, managing the supportive community we had, managing the responses, all seemed like one big mind ****.

    The Real Fear…

    It was only a couple weeks ago, that all the thoughts and emotions, compartmentalized, repressed, began clearing air. And the deepest pain and fear that I faced finally surfaced. Yes, I did lose an unborn child, something I wish nobody would have to experience. However, I also faced watching the slightest possibility of losing the person closest to me, my wife. We were too young to be in an ICU, too young to be hooked up onto IV lines and receiving blood transfusions. It was too early in our marriage to be in this situation.

    This is a pain that I have never experienced before. And that goes after holding my father in my arms as he had a myocardial infarction, riding in an ambulance, seeing him intubated also in the ICU. It goes after rushing to the emergency department with my mother for her to receive a cervical neck surgery because there was a high probability for her to be paralyzed the neck down. It goes after any other broken relationship; it goes after all the let downs in life. It goes after nearly losing my own life.

    … And the Real Love

    When we talk about love, it is mostly in contexts of positive emotions, passion, warmth. Love is movie scenes and media we’ve drowned our subconscious minds in. However, I tasted a kind of love that I couldn’t even imagine. It is the love in the form of pain. It is love in the form of fear. Never have I loved someone so much, to feel a fraction of these kinds of emotions and thoughts. The fact that someone you love can be lost, when made a reality and forced into your hands, is something unparalleled.

    And that brings me somewhat full circle. It is not a great answer, and the recent events of my life will continue to remain a mystery to some degree. But the revelations, are undeniable.

    Life. Life is not something we own. Life is not something we can manufacture or control. Life is not simple. What I once believed was just biological, I now see how much of it is spiritual. I see how much of a correlation there is between the God I believe in being the Creator of life, and how much this living God is a part of each life. From the unborn and born child, to the healthy and near-death wife. It was hard to believe when I read in the Bible that God would open and close the wombs of individual women and even more so entire nations. Yet, this is still true to this day. There are countless women even in my own circle who must face this loss, who must face “miscarriages”. And the fact that it is even labeled a miscarriage shows our view on this loss of life. And it is more painful for our generation because we believe that we create life. We believe that it is in our control. We believe that living a long and healthy life in this affluent country is our will and our choice. Yet, all it takes is one hiccup, where what seemed like such a pleasant story, comes crashing down. God is the giver of life. To begin to even fathom how can God, one being, be the Creator of seven billion people just in this moment of history, not including the billions that came before, is unfathomable. Yet, it does not deny. It is not something to take for granted.

    Love. This epiphany only came while writing this piece—that the kind of love in pain is so expressly seen in the love of God and Christ. This love will always be a mystery, yet it is exciting as pieces of it are discovered. To know the love of God through pain, though I only tasted the possibility of the loss, I can’t imagine that pain if, God forbid, it would ever come to fruition. And what that pain would be is an indescribable fraction of the pain and loss that God and Christ had to endure. And this loss, we confess for the love of others, for the love of the body of Christ. I can’t daresay that I would ever sacrifice my wife’s life for the sake of someone else. That love, is unimaginable. That love is God. And to begin to think that I somewhat understand or comprehend this love? To begin to act that I know this love? There is no way in my human mind and experience, I can even taste a bit of that.

    Peace. There’s another biblical passage that speaks about peace, and it is the peace of God that transcends understanding. I’ve definitely tasted morsels of this peace in the past. Yet, this most recent trial gave me something really to chew on. This peace really confused me, which made the transcendental understanding even more real. Normally, I would have wanted to retaliate, curse God, deny and doubt God’s existence and goodness. I would have wanted to numb my thoughts and emotions by drowning myself in drunkenness. Yet, despite these desires being there, I knew that I didn’t want to resort to these reactions. In the back of my mind, I thought, “What’s the point?” When I know I’ll most likely return to the same place I started off at. And through it all, despite the minimal out lash, the numbing of my mind with movies and games, I knew there was a deeper peace even I was uncertain of. This made me realize that knowing God, yes it strips away some of the worldly pleasures and fun, but knowing God also strips away some of the deepest pains and hurts that most people would not be able to bear.

    Where to end…

    It has only been a few weeks, and my wife and I are certainly in a much better place. We are sure and have been warned that some of the biggest pain comes when everyone else around us seems to have returned to “normal” life, while there may be some lingering pains. However, we both have this peace that transcends understanding, I have my wife whom I love immensely, and we both have our lives right now.

    We are not sure what other trials will come our way. But one thing is for sure, is that I know how fleeting this life is. I know how short amount of time we both have. I know this life is not mine and that at any moment, it can be gone. With that, I want to live with even greater love. I want to live with even greater peace. I want to live the best life that I can, knowing it is nothing but a breath in the wind.

    There is hope. There is a lot of hope. There is hope because God is real. Without God, all of this would end as just an experience. Something to “make me stronger”. My unborn child will just be an unborn child and nothing more. My pains, the peace, and love, would be nothing more than hormonal and chemical reactions. Perhaps just coping mechanisms. My life, would be nothing more than an accident. But I believe in a living God. I believe that there is hope. There is a greater love. There is a greater end.