fatherhood

it’s honestly remarkable how quickly we adapt to change - a 4th cup of coffee at 12am, pavloving myself to burp whenever i’m burping him, and being simultaneously puked on and shat on - all now completely normal.

the reality of it all hit me when i told my close family and friends that we were expecting, i remember my sisters crying immediately upon hearing the news, i was taken aback. the only time i’ve seen a reaction this intense and instantaneous was with grief.

i can’t say i’m too familiar with grief, not yet anyway, but i’ve seen its devastation. i’ve seen how immediate it is, how it waits for nothing, how one phone call can tear worlds apart, how it’s all consuming, leaving absolutely nothing in its wake.

what i hadn’t known at all was its opposite - that someone could pick up a phone and burst into tears from joy. i’ve never seen that before, not in books, films, or even anecdotes. if grief is love and loss, then its opposite, love and gain, is just as sudden, total, and all consuming. how have parents kept this one to themselves?

life is relentless and some people spend their entire lives under the weight of suffering, never knowing that this kind of joy exists. more people should know it exists.

and he was born. 6am, sunday 8th of june.

i thought i felt gratitude before, for the good grades and the jobs, but there has always been a belief that I earned them. deep down, that my hard work was the cause and that I deserved them, and yeah i guess God helped.

but there was no hard work to hide my helplessness behind this time, there was no pretending, out of everything that could have gone wrong, everything that was there to worry about - the fact that he is here and he and his mum are healthy, is nothing short of a miracle. i learnt what God’s Grace was; the undeserving gift that descends to which the only response is gratitude.

and i, for probably the first time in my life, was grateful.

it did make me reflect on what gratitude is. gratitude is the state of being when you don’t feel entitled or deserving of your gifts.

i’m truly not grateful for the eyes i instinctively open in the morning before searching for my phone, the idea that they won’t work is inconceivable. taking things for granted is passive, entitlement is deliberate, blinding us to the fact that things did not have to be this way.

i pray that i can be an ʿabdan shākiran, that i can wake up and sincerely be grateful for God’s grace.