And Now, You Have Those Red Shoes

It was twenty years ago today, when a cheerful, red faced Irish midwife handed me a wriggly bundle of towels and said to me the truest seven words that anyone has ever said.

‘Life will never be the same again’ and she was right. From that moment on I knew exactly what she meant. Our daughter was beautiful. I was all at once elated, overwhelmed and terrified.

Elated because she was finally here. It had been a long, tough road as my wife had been so, so ill during the pregnancy with extreme morning sickness. Neither of us had heard of Hyperemesis but over those first four months we became reluctant experts in a field of medicine we would have never chosen to study. Hyperemesis is nasty, it robs the mother of her well-being, her strength and her dignity. For my wife it was extreme, throwing up 50 to 60 times a day, becoming so dehydrated she had to be admitted into the hospital several times to be put onto a drip. It was at these time that I felt my most useless. All I could do was change the sick bowls for my wife and stroke her face and try and sound convincing when I told her it was going to be OK. All through that time, which lasted several months, our ‘perfect parasite’ kept growing inside and as time went on the sickness subsided and we could start enjoying the prospect of having a child.

Overwhelmed because at the end our daughter got stuck and so the birth plan had to go out of the window as they rushed my wife into theatre for an emergency caesarean. One minute I’m walking around the delivery room with my wife, rubbing her back and telling her she is doing brilliantly, the next they have whisked her away and handed me some theatre scrubs and directed me to a changing room. A few minutes later I am seeing parts of my wife I had never seen before as they skillfully slice and extract while I just watch, fascinated, anxious.

Terrified because the moment we had been working towards for nine months had finally arrived and I really wished I had been paying more attention to the parenting videos we had been given.

I was a Dad. And it scared the life out of me.

I remember in the days and weeks that followed we would comfort ourselves with the thought that stupid people have children all the time. We’re not that stupid so we should be fine.

We weren’t. Often. But like almost every parent I have spoken to since, we are not alone. We love our kids very much and we try to keep on loving them even when they are hard to love and we are in turn also hard for our kids to love us. Every stage of their lives has brought its joys, tears, upsets and frustrations. You never stop worrying; you just worry about different things. And now they are aged 20 and 15, it suddenly hits me that they are growing up and there is nothing I can do to change that.

I was walking up the stairs in our house one Sunday morning and on the landing at the top of the stairs lay my daughters red suede high heeled shoes left there from the previous night. They were so grown up, so sophisticated that I actually stopped climbing the stairs and just looked at them. In the few seconds I stood there I scanned back through my memories, remembering the orange wellingtons from when she first started walking, the shoes she had with lights that flashed purple when she ran, her first pair of black Hush Puppy school shoes and now those red shoes. The red shoes that marked her now as a young woman and me as a middle aged dad who struggles daily with the fact that his kids are turning into adults.

That midwife was so very right. Life has indeed never been the same again. Red shoes and all.