Guest Blogger
Guest Post: How Going Back to Childbirth Helps Keep Me Sane
Safiya Hamid
In his first Family Jewels guest blog post, Zeeshan Hamid of Why My Hair Don’t Grow No More discusses the miracle of childbirth, and why it disgusts him.
It seems befitting to start my first post here with the story of my foray into parenthood: the childbirth. Sending fathers to the delivery room is our society’s manhood rite of passage. You enter the delivery room a boy and come out a man.
The biggest lie ever told about child birth is that it’s beautiful. It seems like a collective conspiracy by all women of the planet. In reality, child birth closely resembles a car accident. They both have loud noises, blood and confused companions. I have heard rumours that CIA opted for waterboarding because they deemed forcing people to watch child birth too cruel. I honestly don’t know how midwives, nurses and obstetricians do it.
My daughter’s birth would be a lot more enjoyable if I was familiar with the phenomenon called ‘newborn child molding’. Basically, I was expecting a pink little baby smelling like Johnson & Johnson’s baby lotion. It would be good to know that they do not naturally smell like that. Imagine my horror when instead I was greeted with a sticky and slimy, purple, cone-head (the pointy cone-headness is due to ‘newborn child molding’. Look it up. I’ll wait).
My thoughts immediately went to the X-Files. After all, Agent Mulder had warned us about aliens impregnating human women. Fortunately, our daughter’s head became nice and round in just a few hours and thanks to Wal-Mart, she started to smell like the Johnson & Johnson’s Wal-Mart knock-off baby lotion (yes, I only wanted the best for my daughter but the knockoff was 12.5% cheaper).
I am actually sharing this for a reason. This conversation happens every single day in the Hamid household:
“Safiya, did you brush your teeth?”
She runs away. 5 minutes later:
“Yes, I did.”
“Did you use the bathroom?”
“Ya.”
“Did you wash your hands?”
She runs away and comes back 2 minutes later with water dripping from her hands: “I washed my hands.“
“With soap?“
“Oh.“
At this point she runs back to the bathroom again.
To maintain my sanity I have to go back to her birth. Believe it or not, for a moment I felt helplessness when I first saw her extremely pointy head. It just took a little patience and she turned into a baby I expected her to be. I keep telling myself that I just need a little patience and she’ll turn into a lady I expect her to be.
I don’t have very high demands, just remembering to brush her teeth and washing hands with soap is all I am asking.
Zeeshan Hamid is a married father of three, community activist, Milton council candidate for ward 8 and author of Why My Hair Dont Grow No More.
Tags: Guest Blogger, Zeeshan Hamid
(My post on the Canadian Family Magazine blog) How Going Back to Childbirth Helps Keep Me Sane … http://twurl.nl/npyn7i
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
From Canadian Family Magazine: http://bit.ly/cw093C (Why Focus on childbirth keeps me sane)
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
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