I thought I would reach back to my Journal for July 11th, 1985. It was Pat's first birthday and we were at Walden Pond. Here is a little snip of what I wrote that day reflecting on the first year of his birth..
"Here is your son, Meg" said Dr. Schulman who was holding our baby high enough for her to see. That baby had the unhappiest blue face I had ever seen. "What are you going to call him?" asked the doctor. Meg and I were both crying and laughing at the same time. We still hadn't settled on a name!
The assistants brought the baby over to the other side of the room where they continued to clean him off and weigh him. Our nurse Sarah invited me to come over and watch. When I got over there, the baby was still crying...screaming...while the attendants stuck tubes down his throat and in his nose to clean out the fluid. I guess I'd cry too. His skin was slowing getting pink as he struggled against these intrusions. I really became a father at that moment when I put my finger in his tiny hand and he gripped me tightly. I will never foget that moment as it has become symbolic for my feeling about my son and what we mean to each other.
Here, kicking and screaming for all of his 8pounds 3 ounces of baby boy lay everything I really believe in: hope, trust, love and the future. When he held on to my finger it was like a message from another world that all these ideas are real. I knew I was participating in a miracle - not of my own making - but a miracle that I was responsible for. With the birth of my son ( and later all of my children ) I was expanded into something more than an individual. I was renewed in a way I can't explain. I was changed into something more than I thought I was. I became a father.
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