Birthright #4
On a February night, with sleet rattling against the windows and the baby monitor hissing softly beside the kettle, I found myself walking circles through the kitchen with my six-week-old son in my arms. He was a small hot weight who refused to understand the notion of night.
The house was otherwise asleep. The dim light over the hob threw our shadows enormous against the wall.
It was in those circles, that rhythm of shush-bounce-breathe, that I began to notice how my thoughts drifted back to Dad unbidden. I thought of how, at thirty-eight, I had now lived longer without him than with him.
I thought of the way he sometimes stared at nothing as if listening to something far away.
As a child, I didn’t understand why he wasn’t always present mentally.
Now, with a screaming infant squirming against my chest, sleep deprivation tunnelling my vision, and the dull headache of worry settling behind my eyes, I felt a pinprick of understanding.
I understood why he sat in the dark. I understood the way silence can feel like oxygen when you’re drowning in the sea of life and all you have is a thin corridor of work and responsibility.
Fatherhood, I discovered, was a constant negotiation between love and the urge to step outside for a breath of quiet. I recognised the temptation to withdraw, to shut a door and sit in the shed because the world in there was smaller and therefore controllable.
There were moments – changing a nappy at three in the morning or rocking a screaming infant while my whole body ached – when I would catch sight of myself in the dark window and, for a heartbeat, see my father’s outline instead.
It was there in the slope of my shoulders, in the set of my jaw.
It frightened me to see bits of him in me, not in the shape of my nose or the angle of my jaw but in the way exhaustion made me want to be alone.
I began to understand how small, unspoken resentments could accumulate like silt.
I loved my son with a ferocity that frightened me, and yet my brain still produced that whispered please stop when he wouldn’t settle.
The horror was not that the thought existed but that it felt, for that instant, so natural.
Simple behaviours we’d once ascribed to character flaws now looked like symptoms. The way he sat in the car on the drive for ten minutes after coming home from work.
The way he flinched when I shouted while playing.
The way he sometimes did the washing up at one in the morning, sleeves rolled up, headphones in, as if noise would drown out something worse.
I had thought those things were peculiarities. I now felt them as impulses in myself.
***
After an eternity of pacing, my son went limp with sleep and I slowly lowered him into his crib, every muscle in my back aching. For the first time all night, the house was silent. Relief flooded through me so suddenly that I wanted to weep.
I headed downstairs, a soft sigh leaving my lips as relief flooded me, and sat in the kitchen with the hum of the fridge.
And I didn’t move for a long time. The kitchen clock ticked.
The central heating clicked off. Somewhere, faintly, a car passed on the wet road.
Somewhere in the plumbing, a pipe clicked, and then all was quiet again.
Something old shifted inside me, like a floorboard settling under a familiar weight.
I understood how a man might become exhausted enough to crave silence more than anything else. Just the absence of noise, of demands, of a world that kept asking without knowing how much had already been given.
I thought of my dad looking at me on that last evening, his eyes searching my face as if for permission. And, for the first time, my anger dissolved not into forgiveness exactly but into recognition.
He’d been afraid and tired and damaged, and he’d not known how to say those things without shattering. And neither did I.
Then, the baby monitor crackled and the wailing of my son cut through it. I felt a surge of sharp, irrational resentment.
No.
Not again.
Please … please stop.
It wasn’t anger. That was the worst part.
If it had been anger, I could have dismissed it.
Blamed stress. Lack of sleep. But this felt colder than that.
Older. A brief and awful longing for quiet.
For just five minutes, where nobody needed anything from me.
No crying. No responsibility. No noise inside my own head.
My hands began to shake. I pressed them against my knees and stared into the dim kitchen while my son cried upstairs and the house creaked softly around me.
I suddenly understood how exhaustion could hollow a man out slowly enough that nobody noticed it happening.
How someone could begin mistaking silence for peace.
How a person might start reaching for the wrong thing simply because it promised stillness.
And, for the first time in years, I thought of that safe, the combination, and the pistol inside.
The End