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Becoming a father was something I never knew could happen so quickly.
I had woken up that morning a doctor, a medical professional with some scars on my body and experience in my mind.
Yet I had gone to sleep a doctor, a medical professional, and a father.
The baby had been born that afternoon. It was a crisis. The mother had died in what seemed to be a pile-up on a nearby roadway. She was dead by the time her body was pulled in through the hospital doors and brought to the operating room. I was on standby, like usual, watching from afar as the doctors checked the woman’s vitals for any sign of life. There was nothing. She was long gone.
The cluster of doctors slowly moved the equipment from her chest to her abdomen, clinging onto the hope that the child was alive. If I’m being honest I had my doubts. Given the circumstances a hard enough collision could have easily broken the womb or completely restricted blood flow. A car crash was more than likely to do that.
I was proven wrong, very very wrong.
Less than a moment later I was standing in the operation room drenched in blood with a wailing baby cradled against my chest. A baby who clearly was not dead. Despite the odds she was not only alive, but healthy as can be. I wasn't all that familiar with children at that point in time, so my only gauge for the health of an infant was dead or alive.
I saw a doctor reach out, her hands trying to grab the child “S-sir, we need to-“.
Instinctively I backed away. I had no clue why. Some part of me simply acted before my brain could catch up. Fight or flight. “You don’t have to worry, I can handle this”. I carefully moved her to my chest and let her head rest against the shiny fabric of my scrubs. Her cries softened. I felt her tiny fists clutching onto my sleeves.
In all my years of medical experience I had never done anything like this. I’ve performed procedures on infants and done my fair share of cesarean sections. But holding a child was something….different. During the procedures I would simply hand the child to their mother and watch from afar. The mother would clutch her offspring and cry. I never understood the reason for the tears.
Now it all made sense to me.
I had sneaked off to a vacant room after the child and I had both gotten cleaned up. I had replaced my scrubs with a shirt I had borrowed from the lost and found, and the baby was swaddled in a soft pink blanket that the hospital had provided. Along the way I managed to snatch a brochure or two about motherhood and read them in order to prepare for my apparent role as this orphans father. The hospital could not find any relatives willing to take in the child, not even distant friends or neighbors. Those selfish idiots.
“Alright alright...first things first….how to bond with your child...let them lay against your….bare chest? This helps the mother and child bond…?” I was surprised by what the guide said, but going against any shred of dignity I pulled back my shirt and moved the child from my arms to my exposed chest. She seemed to enjoy it, closing her eyes and clinging onto my scar covered chest.
“Huh, you don’t seem to mind my scars. That’s a first”
The baby did not respond. Upon a gentle prodding I found that she was asleep. Apparently my body made an adequate bed for her.
“Sleeping already? You’ve been alive for less than an hour. You’ve spent nine months sleeping, but to be fair I bet a car crash will rattle anyone”
I got no response from her besides the tiniest sneeze.
“Bless you”
Talking to an infant incapable of understanding or producing speech felt useless. Logically it made no sense. I was wasting time and energy doing something I could not understand. However that didint matter. It made me happy, it made her happy. It was good.
“Kid you need a name. I can’t simply put you on the national census with no name. Itll just be a placeholder though, you can change it whenever you want if you decide if no longer fits you”.
I went through a million names I had stored in my mind, most of them past patients who’s cases I seldom remembered but who’s names stuck out. I whispered a dozen names before I found one that fit her.
“Pinoko, what do you think about that name?”
Frankly everyone was suprised to see pinoko and I the next day. I often walked around in a suit complete with my briefcase and cape (for protection of course). This morning was different. I had made plans to travel back home so I needed to leave the hospital as soon as possible. Pinoko kept me up all night with her screaming so I ended up leaving the hospital in borrowed/stolen clothes with my half-open briefcase in one hand and a very angry child in the other. Unsurprisingly the entire staff was looking at me.
“Come on kid, your embarrassing us. I’m a doctor and I need to keep my air of sophistication”
Pinoko didint give a shit. She hit the bottom of my chin with her little angry baby fists.
“You may not have much strength in those baby hands, but you hurt my heart pinoko, you should be ashamed of yourself”
I lowered my head in shame and fled out of the hospitals front doors. My taxi was running late, so I took the time to sit down under the shade of an awning and talk to my newfound daughter.
“Pinoko, you should know better than that. You embarrassed both of us back there. I’ll never be able to show my face there again”
She didint say anything, only rubbing her eyes with her little baby fists.
“Pinoko I brought you into this world, and you know I can take you out of it. There’s a sea full of sharks that would love to eat you for breakfast”
Pinoko responded with a small whimper.
“Oh...oh sorry I didint mean it like that. It was a joke, it was just sarcasm” I clutched pinoko close to my chest “I love you kid, I would never throw you to the sharks”
Adjusting to life with a child was easier said than done. My home, once empty and cold with nobody else besides myself and the occasional hired cleaner, became filled with toys and all sorts of childish nonsense. Pinoko, who was around four months at this point, was seated on my lap as I played piano. The piano was a gift from long ago, and I enjoyed playing music for the two of us.
“Ok pinoko, time for sonata number 9, one of my personal favorites, how about you try to play along?”
Pinoko was a step ahead of me and was already smashing her grubby little baby hands into the piano keys.
“Pinoko! Settle down! That’s not how you play piano! Here, I’ll show you”
I reached out and let my hands float above the keys. Muscle memory took hold as i closed my eyes and took in the soft sounds of the symphony. Every key, every note, all played by expert fingers.
“Your turn, try to repeat what I did”
I lifted pinoko so she was able to more accurately reach the keys. She hesitated for a moment, before once again punching the keys with relentless fervor.
“Pinoko…..when will you learn”