Year One of Fatherhood – Thoughts on Being a New Parent

            The overarching theme of this blog is my life, so it follows I must talk about what’s been the biggest part of my life since the time my wife became pregnant, my little pokrik jan, Jareth, aka Jare Bear, Jerry Berry, etc. He turned 1 year old on the 13^th this month. We’ve kept him alive for an entire Earth orbit, and that is certainly an achievement worth celebrating. It’s been an interesting year, and a lot’s changed. Although it’s his birthday, it’s also an occasion for my wife Deborah and I to look back and reflect.

We were timing the contractions the night she went into labor.

It was early January 12^th, 2019, when Deborah began to have labor pains. This began a sleepless night in which I sat beside her, playing calming music on the TV as she was in agony, trying my best to comfort her while also trying not to panic myself. We didn’t go to the hospital right away; instead we waited until morning. I was at her bedside the whole day as she was in labor, letting her squeeze my hand every time a contraction caused her to scream. Nobody knew just how big the baby was going to be; if they’d known, she might have had a C-section. As it was, he was more than a week late. The doctors tried to get her to push, but he wasn’t clearing the pelvic bone. Morning became afternoon, afternoon became evening, and night. The baby still wasn’t out. My mother-in-law and I stayed with Deborah in the delivery room the entire day, not really doing anything else. That night doctors gave Deborah a horizontal bar to hang on over the bed while she pushed so that gravity would do some of the work, and that helped a little, but the baby was simply too big.

 It may not have been a pleasant experience for me, but I wasn’t the one in painful agony for more than 24 hours. It feels kind of petty and selfish to complain about whatever discomfort I was in, after more than one and a half sleepless nights. But I will say it was just awful listening to the screams and cries of pain of my wife who I love. She felt like giving up at times. She didn’t want painkillers but eventually she had to take them. I’ll never know what the pain feels like. I’ve had a horrible root canal that went on for hours because my dentist decided to go on lunch break in the middle of it, and that’s probably nothing compared to the pain of childbirth, despite being one of the most painful things I personally have endured. I felt guilt for putting her through this much pain.

            We were all sure he was going to be born on January 12^th, but it wasn’t until sometime after 2am on January 13^th when Jareth Sevan Daniel Oganessian came into the world at long last (his fourth birthday will be on Friday the 13^th, how lucky). He got stuck on his way out; the doctors shoved me away and had to perform an emergency cut to get him out. I was in a daze. There was blood on the floor, screams, and chaos. When they took him out, I swear he looked like a four-year-old. Ten pounds, fourteen ounces. My family has big babies. A candid picture was taken as the baby was placed in Deborah’s hands, with me watching. I wasn’t even fully aware of what was going on thanks to a lack of sleep. I was wearing a coat in the picture because they kept the temperature in that hospital in the 40’s Fahrenheit it seemed.

            Jareth was named after Jareth the Goblin King, David Bowie’s character from the movie Labyrinth. It was my idea. At one point in the movie, Jareth has the baby he kidnapped on his knee, and says “I think I’ll name him Jareth. He has my eyes.” That was the line that made me want to name my future son Jareth. Sadly, my son Jareth didn’t get the blue eyes that most males in my family have, for some reason. But oh well. People have asked why I didn’t name him Suren, but the family tradition is that the name skips a generation. My firstborn grandson who bears the Oganessian surname gets to be Suren III; should Jareth choose to have kids and follow the tradition. Sevan is the obligatory Armenian name he needed to have in there somewhere. I always liked that name. It’s a very pretty lake in Armenia. Daniel was the name of Deborah’s sadly deceased half-brother, so that had to be in there somewhere in memory of him. It’s a long name, but when he’s older he can choose which name to go by, just like I did (I went by my middle name Michael until I was 18). If he’s ever in Armenia he can go by Sevan. There’s no “th” sound in Armenian so they’d have a hard time with it.

There was a strange couple days after his birth where it really didn’t register in my brain that he was my baby, even though I knew he was. It felt like babysitting at first. We stayed in a sort of hotel at the hospital while Deborah recovered in a very uncomfortable bed that only made her back aches worse, while I passed out on a hard cot. Little Jareth was born with a slight jaundice and needed to be put under a blue light to treat it. Phototherapy they called it. Time seemed to stop in this room as we waited. I had my laptop, and a copy of The Patchwork Girl of Oz by L. Frank Baum to read to Jareth (he’d never sit still long enough to read to him today, sigh). Soon after we brought him home it did finally start to sink in that he was my son, and it was like a type of love I’ve never felt before. You’d never really know it unless you experienced it. It felt nice. It was exciting, being a brand-new parent. I’d get to pass on my knowledge, I’d get to read him the books I wrote, show him my music, all the cartoons I used to watch when I was a kid. All that fun stuff. A brand-new start. Who knows if he’ll actually like the same things I do, but one can hope.

Here he is in his crib for the first time, watched by Fievel, Tails, and my old teddy bear Coco

In the first year he’s proven to be rather picky in his tastes. He does love the song “Sledgehammer” by Peter Gabriel, which I loved at his age too. But he does that thing babies and toddlers do when it comes to music and anything they watch, he wants to see it on repeat a hundred times a day. That is, when he’s in the mood to sit still, which over the months has decreased exponentially. He loves anime opening themes for some strange reason, and has to watch them every time my wife and I put on anime. He also loves the Armenian children’s music I put on for him to familiarize him with the language; now I’ve heard it all so many times I’m desperate to get him into anything else! Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood is sadly a no from him, and Sesame Street he might watch for a couple minutes. He's not allowed to watch anything too annoying or asinine. Most of the time he’ll sit through the beginning theme of a show and then wander off to get into mischief. It’s really hard to get him to like anything he hasn’t already watched or listened to a million times. But, kids shouldn’t sit in front of the TV for too long anyway, so it’s probably a good thing.

I’ve heard it said by many people that babies will just kind of fit into your life, even if it seems like they won’t before you have one. I’ve found that it’s true in the sense that you’ll eventually get used to having one and adjust to the new reality, to the point where you’ll forget what it was like before you had a kid. Not completely, obviously it’s only been a year, but I am kind of forgetting what it was like. He’s a big responsibility; a 24-7 job. A lot of men who get a girl pregnant run from that responsibility. They can’t handle it. They don’t want fatherhood to interrupt their eternal childhoods. To be honest some women run from motherhood too, but less often. But I’d never run away from fatherhood. I think if I’d become a father at twenty for example, I may have been terrified, but I wouldn’t have run from it. I’d have stepped up to the plate, even though I wasn’t ready.

He’s spent the year growing and learning rapidly. His mind is a sponge. I liken it to the Big Bang; his mind is like an expanding universe. He spends every second learning something. Things that we long ago accepted as a mundane everyday reality are new and exciting to him. For example, the other day when we were at the library, they announced over the intercom that they were going to close soon. I’ve heard intercoms all my life so I don’t think twice about them, but he let out a happy shriek and looked around, wondering where that voice was coming from. I could learn a lot by trying to look at the world the way he does. I’ve forgotten what it’s like to have a child’s fresh mind, pure and unsullied. The world hasn’t beaten his innocence to the ground like it has my own. Maybe one day he’ll help me recapture some of it. There’s a certain wisdom babies have that we’ve lost. Perhaps it came as a price for the knowledge needed to survive in the world.

He changes as much in one month as an adult changes in ten years. Every month it’s like having a completely different baby. Over the summer he began to drag himself along with his arms, then he started properly crawling around September, now he’s at the stage where he’ll hold onto couches and tables for support as he walks. He’s on the cusp of walking. He wants to examine everything, he’s always craving new objects and new places to explore, and he seems to prefer electronic devices that he shouldn’t touch to actual toys. He’d rather play with a digital clock, a modem, a laptop, or my shelf of VHS tapes than a toy. The forbidden fruit effect is strong in him. He wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes in the Garden of Eden. He doesn’t sit still anymore either unless he’s sleeping. He used to sit in my lap for quite a while in the beginning, but now he’ll scream and twist his body if I put him in my lap for a second because he always has to be on the move. I don’t know how I’m going to do it when he’s running around.  I often wonder how long he would last without anybody watching him at all.

He's a team effort between Deborah and I. He requires constant attention unless he’s asleep, and even then, you don’t really want to leave the room when he’s asleep, because who knows what he’s going to do when he wakes up. Sure, there’s unpleasant aspects to fatherhood sometimes, but all in all it’s worth it. I love the little guy. He gives me a purpose and makes me feel needed. And that helps me through the rough times in life; I need to feel needed. I am worried about the world he’s going to have to grow up in, but it’s my job to do all I can to make sure he survives in it.