When will I be you? - father remembers own birth and childhood

Then something strange happened. I felt as if I were my father holding me as a newborn--as if the gates that separated my father's life from mine, as well as those that separated my life from my son's, had fallen and our waters were washing through.

Before the umbilical cord was cut, the nurse placed my son on his mother's chest. He did not cry or wiggle; he lay there like a rag doll. "He's not breathing," Sarah said, whereupon the doctor quickly cut the cord.

The nurse whisked my son out of the labor room and into the delivery room, where she suctioned his airways with a long, narrow tube. I followed. As my son lay blue and limp under the bright heat lamp, I thought, "He's dead." Then he started to move, and his wrinkled skin turned violet. The nurse swaddled him and set him in my arms. "He'll be fine," she said. "Not all the fluid was squeezed out of his lungs. It happens sometimes."

When I returned to the labor room holding Scott, I reassured Sarah that he was all right. She--a nurse who had seen plenty of newborns suctioned--had never believed he was in danger. For me, however, our first child had been born, died, and been brought back to life in a matter of minutes. I was not prepared for this final round of joy, grief, and gratitude.

I held Scott to my chest. All I could see of him was his hair, matted with blood and amniotic fluid, and, beneath the protruding forehead, his puckered face. He started to open his eves, and then closed them, with a frown. "It's the light," I said to Sarah. "It's too bright." Carrying him into the adjoining bathroom, I drew the door partly closed behind us. In the shadow of the door, Scott opened his eyes. They were clear and blue, and they looked directly into mine.

Then something strange happened. I felt as if I were my father holding me as a newborn--as if the gates that separated my father's life from mine, as well as those that separated my life from my son's, had fallen and our waters were washing through. It was unlike anything I had ever experienced, and yet as familiar as any powerful emotion. Like joy or grief or gratitude. Or love.

When Scott was a year old, we moved from our apartment to a house with a backyard and garage. This was the first suburban home I had lived in since boyhood 35 years before. One March night, I was hanging shelves in the garage while Scott played among empty cardboard boxes nearby. For an instant, I was standing in my parents' garage--standing inside my father, so it seemed, swinging a hammer with him as he drove a nail into a wood beam. He and I, separated by time and space, were standing in the same place at the same time, hammering the same nail while a little boy looked on, a boy who was both my son and myself.

I did not need a doctor or minister to tell me what this meant. My father had been diagnosed with leukemia the previous January and, after six weeks of chemotherapy, thought he had it beat. But in early spring, as it turned out, he returned to the hospital. And on the second of May, he died.

My father and I had never really talked. He was a quiet man who worked all day and drank too much at night. Still, he loved his children. He played with us, fixed our toys, and later fixed our cars. He helped us move and gave us money whenever his second wife was not looking. When I brought him a book at the hospital, he cried. The book was about people who recover from cancer. What he wanted was a book about boats.

Like most little boys, Scott wants to do everything daddy does. When he sees me shaving, he asks for shaving cream, just like I asked for shaving cream from my dad. If he sees me putting up lights in the living room or building planter boxes in the yard, he wants to join in, and he wants to do it with whatever tool I am using at the moment. One day, he asked, "When will I be you?" The question made perfect sense.

"Some day," I said. Some day when he has a son of his own, maybe. Or when I die. Or perhaps he won't need a living--or deceased--copy of himself to help him realize who he is, who he has always been. Probably he already knows. Anyone who can ask a question like that knows an awful lot.

The strange experiences continue, only now they do not surprise me, and I hardly lose a step. I cannot tell you how many times I have glanced in the mirror and seen my father looking back, or seen in Scott's eyes, blue like mine and my father's, a look that draws me out, and for a moment, the three of us swirl in a single current, one and the same.

John Johnson (38) lives in Petaluma, California, with his wife Sarah and their children Scott (6 1/2) and Ellen Jane (2 1/2).

COPYRIGHT 1994 Mothering Magazine
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