Parenting

"From this moment on, every choice I make will have your face," I told myself.

Written by: Robert Aliaj

How can I witness the awakening, the anxiety of waiting for a sweet cry, for a first breath, the excitement of the moment when you embrace your newborn from its mother's womb, emerging from the darkness to be revealed only by a dim light and the quiet noises of waiting in a maternity room immersed in the white neon light so annoying that it didn't let you think, that it took your mind somewhere else, that it seemed to not allow you to breathe fully.

As a father, you prepare for many things, besides the rush of indescribable passion that runs through your veins at that moment. I was very focused there on that single point. I no longer saw the room, nothing. I saw only there, what was happening in front of me, that moment experienced as a delicate blossom. Moza was pressing, squeezing my hand and I was pressing hers, but we were no longer us. We were something else, two animals waiting. The gynecologist spoke in a voice that seemed to me to be coming from the next room while the nurse made rapid robotic movements.

I was thinking about the strangest things possible. About the car I had sold a while ago. I was thinking about “Pataten Zak”, a restaurant in Strombeek Bever where I had eaten a spaghetti bolognese that had made me vomit, it had seemed like a failed risotto. I was trying to find the name of a city that was not coming to mind.

I started thinking about everything except what was happening right in front of me.

I wasn't ready. No one is ever ready.

You prepare for an endless list of unimportant things.

But don't you prepare yourself for that truth? For that moment when you feel someone else's pain inside your soul, when you see life's most precious traveler struggling to come to light and you helplessly stand there, clenching the fingers of one palm in nervousness, imagining?

It was a struggle. I just waited. And boom, a cry that didn't belong in any language I knew and then another, smaller one. Then immediately the release and her appearance. Time no longer mattered. Nor did the people around. What was happening was a silent agreement between me and something bigger than me. Oh God. Life in its most laconic and authoritative form.

Chaos. A complete void. Then horror:

A small, wet body as dark as a bean, with a head like a ball of black wool and a face completely covered.

“What is this?”

This dark, wet ball, covered in a mysterious layer like moss, or something that has just emerged from the depths of a stagnant lake, is astonishing.

Is this the thing? Is this the person? This black woolly ball, this wrinkled face.?

And then the voice.

It's the thing you can never forget.

A sharp cry as a claim to existence, a:

"Here I am. Now it begins."

As soon as he came out, he tried to pick me up for the first time.

The midwife picked it up and placed it in my palm.

And there were no more metaphors here.

It was physical weight with a rusty face in a strange and perfect red at the same time.

"Why are you crying?"

"I'm not crying, I'm just... touched."

Or was I crying because I had no words to express what I was feeling?

Because she was there. In my hands. How did she get there?

But there it was.

So small. So unexpectedly small.

Or I had no way to process the size.

I stood completely still. I thought that if I moved, something would break them.

I didn't know what, but something

It was fragile.

I cried because I had touched the essence of my life, the one for which I would give my life without hesitation.

"Now you are no longer the center of everything and this is non-negotiable"

"It doesn't surprise me..."

"From this moment on, every choice I make will have your face on it," I told myself.

"The day will come when you will oppose me and I will accept it unconditionally."

"Don't let go," I encouraged myself.

"Never let go, hold it closer to your heart."

I counted my fingers, my eyes tightly closed, my mouth moving as if trying to find air, something like a labored breathing.

I told:

"Gala".

That's all.

With voice.

And I felt for a moment as if a tectonic plate shifted something inside me.

It was like adopting a new law of gravity, from then on everything would be pulled towards that small weight in my palm.

It's this.

This little thing weighs less than a bottle of milk.

This thing that doesn't know anything about me, that doesn't know my name, that doesn't know who I am or what I've done, or what I haven't done.

What a life I had under dictatorship.

That I sang for the first time at the age of twenty-nine, that I didn't have to paint the things my soul wanted?

This thing that I don't know that I sometimes exaggerate about little things, that I don't know that I have claustrophobia if my face is covered, that I'm sometimes afraid of the dark when I'm home alone.

This thing that knows nothing about the darkness of the world that surrounds us, about those things that we know and that keep us awake at night.

She knows nothing and I'm the one who's going to teach her. I don't know anything about myself. Who my grandmother was, where my grandfather lived, nothing, except names that I can barely remember.

That I was born in a city that had decided to forget itself, because in our Tirana, whoever takes power decides that history will begin again as if there had only been darkness there before and nothing worth remembering.

There were no old bookstores. There were no scythemakers, watchmakers, and shops that had been there for generations.

"This city has no soul, because they didn't allow it to have a memory."

City with Alzheimer's.

"How can one live in a city without memory?"

I held Gala tightly in my hands, as if I never wanted to let her go.

Moza was talking to me. I could hear her voice, but I couldn't catch the words. It was like music that I liked, but couldn't understand at that moment.

The nurse asked to serve Gala and interrupted my thoughts.

Gala had long, dark eyelashes, her eyes were blue, almost black, and they still didn't see anything.

Or maybe they saw everything. Maybe things I couldn't see?

I was left empty with forgotten arms, still open waiting to take Gala back into my arms, while I thought about my father. That I didn't remember any aspect of his voice. I think about him often. But why was he there in my head at that moment, holding me as if I were him, that little newborn?

Why was he looking at me the same way I was looking at Gala?

Had he felt what I'm feeling now?

This pure sweet terror?

This feeling that something very big has just happened and there's no turning back?

"It's beautiful," someone interrupted me.

I wasn't sure if it was beautiful. It didn't look like the things I called beautiful.

It seemed like something new, something that had just arrived and hadn't yet decided whether it would stay here or not.

The nurse had said she had to wash or weigh him. Something technical that I didn't understand and I hesitated, I didn't want to give it to him.

Had I held him to protect him?

Protect him? From whom?

Moza was laughing and crying with joy at the same time.

I wasn't laughing. I wasn't crying.

Later, much later, I went to the bathroom and leaned my hands on the sink, looking at myself in the mirror.

When I returned to the room, Gala was there in Moza's arms, sleeping.

Or was he doing that thing newborns do, which isn't really sleep, but something else, a liminal state closer to his origins not yet fully anchored here, something closer to where he came from.

Sitting in the chair next to Gala's neonatal basket, I was thinking:

This is my daughter.

That will change everything in my life.

That I would never sleep the same way again.

That I would no longer walk the same paths.

That I would no longer look at the world with the same interest

That I didn't yet know how much I would lose and how much I would gain.

She moved slightly, making a sweet little sound.

I only knew that she had come and changed everything and that nothing would ever be the same again.

I was not mentioned until dawn, the time that would bring me home for a few hours of sleep. To wash up, to feel like I was still a normal person, with normal duties before the day unfolded a host of new demands.

Around four in the morning I left the hospital exhausted, excited.

The cold late summer air slapped me in the face. And then I saw him.

The moon.

There.

Hanging in the indigo sky, the largest and most brilliant Moon I had ever seen in my life. Magnificent, with a luminescent orb surrounding it crowned with silver light, it seemed to bathe everything beneath it in its dazzling brilliance.

Hanging right above the roof of our house.

I approached the car with the feeling that the world around me had transformed into a magical tableau.

It even gave the asphalt a wet sheen that turned cars into clay sculptures.

I stood there motionless for I don't know how long, amazed by this celestial phenomenon that was resonating with my emotions. For a moment I completely forgot where I was and why. It was so unexpected, so sublime!

Just as the full moon directs the tides of the oceans, Gala was directing the tides of my heart. Everything that had happened that day, the anxiety, the pain, the fear, the first cry, the first touch, all became one movement. I had become a drop of water in the universe where a baby named Gala existed and I was her father.

And there, in the simplicity of this truth, in the maternity parking lot under that heavenly light, I said to myself:

"Now we're going to start something completely new."

I got into the car exhausted without starting the engine. I closed my eyes for a few minutes.

Careful.

The way home seemed like a journey through a world bathed in moonlight.