The rise of fatherhood

Having a child is probably one of the most incredible things that can happen to a person. It is a moment unlike any other, especially when it is about the first child. There are myriad emotions overwhelming a person simultaneously and it is probably difficult for anyone to decipher what exactly are these emotions wreaking havoc inside. And I am just referring to the days leading up to and right after the birth; there are a million other things one might feel in the time from conception to the time of the birth and a million more will follow while raising the child, but the moment one sees one's child for the very first time is an exquisite cocktail of head spinning emotions. Sufficient content has been written and consumed repeatedly over centuries on how it feels to become a mother, right from excruciating anatomical details to tiniest of emotional details. Males, generally, are more immune to emotions, yet the advent of fatherhood does invoke quite an emotional response even from the most frosty ones (even if they deny it and don't have any visual indications of it). Most of it is probably plain old biological programming hard - wired to ensure the propagation of the species, yet, it is crafted so exquisitely that one can't help but wonder if it is the same for everyone or unique to one.

So, what does it feel like for a make to have a child? Like being hit by a freight train and still delightful? Here are the top ingredients I could pick out of the heady emotional cocktail of new-found fatherhood:

1. Helplessness / powerlessness

Yes, that is correct, the most conspicuous emotion a soon-to-be father experiences is helplessness / powerlessness. It doesn't matter where you are from and how wonderful and state-of-the-art the medical facilities are, the period of time when your partner is undergoing contractions and labor pain, or the period of time when your partner is in the OT for a c-section, you will feel the stark antonym of omnipotence - sheer powerlessness; you want everything to be alright, you want your child to be born healthy, you want your partner to make it out of it unscathed (relatively speaking). But, you realize that despite your best efforts, as a mere mortal, all you have control and sway over is just your own anatomy (that too, barely). It is at this moment you understand the need of relinquishing control, essentially and precisely because you have none.

2. Belief in higher powers

No matter your religious outlooks, when you sit and wait for your child to arrive, when you have acknowledged your own helplessness, the next step along the journey is to question the cosmos - if not me, then who? That question inevitably leads to an answer not everyone ascribes to but gleefully or resentfully agrees to - that there is something beyond our knowledge and comprehension that now controls the outcome of this episode. People ascribe a multitude of names to it - god, destiny, fate, karma, the universe, the cosmos. That is when the ones with a sense of religion start to pray, and the ones who believe in the laws of attraction and the universe probably send out vibes and thoughts into the universe. Either way, you beg whoever is in control of the outcome to flip the coin in your favour, because you cannot, no matter how hard you try.

3. Joy

The most-associated emotion with child birth is probably joy and it is so because of valid reasons. The moment you see your child for the first time, you experience pure, unadulterated, cosmic joy. If you want to draw figurative parallels of it, do not even try. There is no other feeling and not enough adjectives to describe it. Perhaps the word “joy” itself is an underwhelming image of it. It is probably akin to being touched by angels or blessed by god , but who knows? It is boundless, it is transformative, it is the extent of emotional cognition. No matter what words are used, you would only know it if you have experienced it.

4. Anxiety

From the moment you first hold your child, with the slew of all the love and care that wakes up in the deepest, darkest crevices of your soul, there is also a dark passenger - anxiety. There is a constant state of anxiousness that persists and heightens every time someone checks on your child, everytime your child makes a sound, everytime the breeze touches your child gently, everytime the clock ticks. And it is not just anxiety; there is a mix of fear and worry alongside it. This concoction makes you wish that somebody had invented time travel prior to this moment so that you can look into the future just to make sure that everything turns out just right for your little thing. There is no alleviating this constant state of anxiousness; there is no remedy, just the sense of perplexing fear lurking consistently.

5. Protectiveness

With the constant worry comes the antithesis of it as well - constant protectiveness . As a father, you feel responsible for keeping your child safe constantly. You monitor every aspect of the environ to assess potential threats, you scan every individual approaching your child, you put an extra pillow around to ensure they are well cushioned, you pull your child closer to your chest when a chilly gust of wind threatens a sneeze and you innately are ready to do everything in your power to make sure no harm comes to your child on your watch, even though nobody told you to do so.

Conclusion

That said, these are not the only emotions you would feel and, depending on you, you may or may not feel all of these. And if this sounds discouraging or it appears to highlight negative emotions over the positive ones, just remember that this is about a very small , albeit important , chapter of a much larger tale that is yet to be written. Nobody said raising another human being would be easy , and well, it apparently isn't.

The Great Continental Divide

We, the Indians, have an innate dilemma, which we are born with. We feel the intensity of this dilemma during our period of education and we recognize its importance once we start bickering for our pay checks. This particular predicament plays a major role in exponentially increasing the size of our text books and also in over-burdening our mental retentive capacity. I am referring to the everlasting, loyal and faithful question of- US or UK. From the time we are born to the time we die, we constantly choose between the American uber-cool way or the British elegant way. The English language which we rigorously mug up during our education is bursting with anomalies arising due to two ways of achieving the same thing. The paradox starts with spellings. We can “colour” a painting or “color” the world with hues, we can be a part of an “organization” or we can be a member of an “organization” as well. Of course, the power to discriminate and choose is in our hands, which is an exciting concept for any student. It is our prerogative which spelling we choose to implement. No power in the world can point out that we misspelled the word. It definitely decentralizes the power of education and grants a miniscule portion of that power into the hands of the students. I suppose it is not a bad concept considering the aforementioned. On the other hand, psychologically speaking, it has a negative impact on the people. Innumerable choices spoil the piety of the language. Unconsciously, we use both the Queen’s English and its American dialect interchangeably, intermixing and entwining both inseparably. Sorry for the orthodoxy, if it may sound that way, but the sheer elegance of English is lost by the chutnification.
Another platform providing a vast scope for the successful growth of this paradox has been pronunciation. The accent of Americans is immensely different from that of the British. The British pronounce every single syllable in the word, even the terminating sound of “r” in “center”. The British defy lethargy when it comes to pronunciation. The integration of glides in the pronunciation provides a touch of elegance and grace to the language. The Queen’s English is mellifluous, soothing to the ears. On the other hand, the American way is built around convenience. The Americans are firm believers in abolishing the needless. As a consequence, there are a lot of letters which are present in writing but which never make it to the tongue. The terminating “r” is invariably dropped from pronunciation, as in “center”. This gives a raw appeal to the American way of pronunciation. It might not be elegant and graceful, but it surely hits a few chords. Thus far, I have had no qualms in admitting the importance of both the British and the American way of doing things. But, in the whole process, the most critical point is not obvious. The most important fact which can be derived out of it is- where is the Indian way of doing it? In choosing between the US and the UK, we have lost our own identities. Why do we blindly chase the two superpowers, instead of carving a niche for ourselves? The answer to that is quite obvious. The maximum employment opportunity for the Indian workforce is provided by companies based in US or Europe. So, to follow the rule of “When in Rome, do what Romans do”, we vigorously try to mould ourselves to suit the cast defined by the Americans or the British. In the process of trimming ourselves to suit these Multi-National Companies (better known as MNCs), we are gradually whittling ourselves away.
Perhaps, the phenomenon of defining dialects of English depends on the status of the nation. Two superpowers of the world have their dialects of English, we do not. So, today, in a spate of patriotism, I hope that someday we will have an Indian English too, an Indian way of pronouncing words and an Indian way of spelling words too. Maybe we will be able to spell “organization” as “organizashun” someday. That will be the day when the tricolor will sprawl across the horizon.