‘The summer I became a father’

Dear Henry, You were born in the height of summer at a hospital in Masterton. This you can find out for yourself easily enough: these details will live on the second page of your passport. But I can go one further: you were born on the steps away from a birthing pool we had just given up on after hours of labour.

Your mother was standing up when you made your entrance. ‘‘Don’t drop it,’’ the midwife said to her student. The ‘‘it’’ in this sentence, I’m sorry to say, was you.

But no-one dropped it. You were carefully snagged, trimmed of your cord, and cleaned up, before being passed back to us as a baby boy. Something I struggled to believe.

In the months preceding I had convinced myself, for no reason at all, that you were a girl. Such notions would have to be pushed aside, for now we had something real. When I held you, you peered back and held my gaze, unwavering.

There are scientific, developmental reasons for this stare I know, but it is also my belief that no baby has done this before or since.

What else? The three of us spent the next three days at that hospital and, while your mother might not have thought the same, for me it was the most pleasant holiday. Of course, there was all the stress and worry of how to look after you, of how to properly interpret your cries and sounds, but the rest of life, the world of work and bills had never seemed so distant.

Once a day I would drive home to water the garden, to feed the cat, and the blazing heat of the Wairarapa summer compounded that sense of a life apart, of each day now so sunny and brandnew. Those tasks were no chore at all.

Even when life did intrude, it felt dreamy and trivial. And it did come knocking, because over those same days we bought a house.

We had decided in the months before that living in the Wairarapa and our long commutes to work would no longer be possible with you about and so we made arrangements to take on this rundown old place over the hill.

We prepared to sell the small house we had made our own. This meant that your very first day involved buzzing phones even as your mother crouched in that pool. Jay from Ray White was urgently trying to contact us and no matter how many times I ignored his call, he tried and tried again. Beware of real estate agents for they are persistent people. If this was your earliest lesson of the world, you will not be poorly prepared.

I could crowd this thing with emotion, write about our hearts exploding, about discovering a tender new type of love. But everyone writes things like that and in doing so prove that such descriptions are futile, and fall over in their attempt to explain the unexplainable.

They leave stuff out too, and so for balance, I will note that we felt irritation at times. The hospital midwives came by, a different one each time, to give advice, so much advice that sometimes it might contradict what we hear from the last. This was School Certificate all over again, except that we were trying to both sit the exam and cram at the same time.

These moments also confirmed our new life as a gang of three, the feeling of your mum and you and

I as in it together, needing to figure things out for ourselves.

Another negative was cold, for me anyway. Those same midwives kindly loaned me a stretcher which I assembled in the narrow space between her bed and the wall so I could spend my nights with you both. This was a great thing except that, despite the heat of the day, I found myself waking constantly in a chill. I wore a jersey and long pants to sleep but nothing was enough.

‘‘Can you stop going on about it,’’ your mother said at the time and will say again on reading this. She had other concerns.

It was only when we went to leave that I discovered that directly above me, hidden by a blind, was a window tilted open at the bottom. The cold night air fell through this gap down to the floor beneath where I lay sleeping. On hitting the warmer air of our room it would have condensed, replicating the vapor-compression cycle of a fridge with me the contents, the cucumber, the tray of eggs, shivering away.

Still, these black spots make only a short list

and each item was easily cancelled out by a look at your tiny body swaddled in starchy hospital cloth. While I could sleep in that room, I wasn’t allowed the hospital food and so, from time to time, I popped down to the cafeteria for coffee and a crumbly scone, stuffing my face before hurrying back for one of those looks, confirmation I hadn’t dreamed your existence.

I remember too, on one of our last days in that hospital, a moment when I held you while your mother visited that cafeteria for a break of her own.

I sat on her bed with you balled up on my chest, an arm under your legs so that you wouldn’t dangle and a hand cupped to your head or otherwise it might flop, listening to the faint rise and fall of each one of your tiny breathes.

Outside in the garden beside the ward someone had gone wild with the hedge clippers, working the buxus into pyramids and orbs.

For a moment I wondered if this was the best use of the stretched health dollar but then corrected myself. It was a great thing I decided, a small marvel that some gardener had given us. And then, another appeared.

A rabbit hopped out onto the tan segment of lawn in front of those shrubs and began to nibble at that parched grass. ‘‘Look buddy,’’ I said to you and I twisted slightly so your eyes could face it. I knew in theory that you couldn’t see that far away, wouldn’t for weeks yet, but even so I wanted you to know. ‘‘A rabbit!’’ I said. It felt important then. It does now too.

Once a day I would drive home to water the garden, to feed the cat, and the blazing heat of the Wairarapa summer compounded that sense of a life apart, of each day now so sunny and brand-new. Those tasks were no chore at all. Even when life did intrude, it felt dreamy and trivial.

John Summers is a New Zealand writer. His latest book of essays, The Commercial Hotel, was published in 2021.