Lou’s View – July 10, 2014

Paul Matthew

by Lou Bernard

“My child arrived just the other day….He came to the world in the usual way…”

As I write this, it’s July 3, 2014. I’m in a hotel in New Orleans, Louisiana. I’m writing my weekly column from thousands of miles away, down around the Mississippi River, in a place I’ve never before been. I can see the parking lot from my window, there’s a couple of cheap paintings of trees on the walls, and I’m sitting at a small table in the corner.
My wife is asleep on one of the beds. And in a hastily assembled crib in the middle of the room lies a two-day-old baby, also peacefully asleep.

This is my son.

Paul Matthew Bernard was born on July 1, 2014. Eight pounds, fourteen ounces. Twenty-two inches long. I am a father.

My wife and I have been working on adopting for the past year and a half. We’ve hired the adoption agency, been through all the background checks, had a home inspection, the works.

And on June 9, just at the beginning of Civil War Week, we got the call.

A birth mother named Brittany, down in New Orleans, Louisiana, had chosen us. All through Civil War Week at the Ross Library, all through preparations for the Clinton County 175th parade, we were waiting for the call saying that Brittany was going into labor. I was a little relieved I was actually able to make the parade; it looked like a close thing. The Teen Paranormal kids have been asking about it every time I see them. Finally, the last day of June, my wife called me at work while I was right in the middle of writing an article about a horse crash on Main Street in 1903.

“It’s time,” she said.

I told everyone that I had to leave—My co-workers have all been very supportive about this. I ran home and got everything prepared, and my wife and I jumped in the car and started the drive to Louisiana. We made it in about twenty-eight hours, stopping briefly in Virginia to sleep.

Brittany, the birth mother, is a sweet girl who is torn between becoming a nurse or a homicide detective. We spent a lot of time with her, got to know her. At the time we entered the hospital room, the baby was out getting some tests done. But I’ll never forget when they wheeled him in—This tiny little living thing that was now, somehow, ours.
I keep pausing while I’m writing this. It’s taking forever. I can write about Henry Shoemaker or the 1936 flood with no problems; I can drink coffee and compose grocery lists in my head while I do it. But tonight I keep going over to check on him.

Paul Matthew.

I am a father.

He sleeps a lot. This kid’s been around about fifty hours now, and I suspect he’s spent about forty-eight of them asleep. It makes me nervous, him sleeping so much. It would also make me nervous if he was awake and crying. Pretty much anything, I guess, would make me a little jumpy at this point. This parenting stuff isn’t so easy. I don’t know how so many teenagers manage it.

I don’t want to be one of those parents who mention their baby two hundred times in a three-minute conversation. I mean, I know how annoying those people can be. “He’s two weeks old. We’re looking at Harvard.” I don’t want to bore and irritate everyone by talking about nothing but the baby constantly. I still want to bore and irritate people by telling them the entire history of Lock Haven in response to every question, even what time it is.
But….I have a son.

It’s an amazing feeling. I have a baby boy. I mean, yes, all you veteran parents know all this already, and all you non-parents don’t get what the big deal is. It’s just this incredible, terrifying feeling….When I got up on the morning of June 30th, I was still the guy who eats peanut butter straight from the jar and once had to call his wife to ask how to get tomato sauce off the houseplants. And the morning after that, out of nowhere, I’m a parent, with this tiny human dependent on me and my wife.

I want to pick my son up and hold him. I want to keep him close. I want to teach him all this history of his community, the place where he’s going to grow up. I don’t much want to change diapers, but I will if I have to.

But mostly, I want to hold him and whisper in his ear. Tell him that I’ll always be here for him, always protect him and love him endlessly.
But he knows that already.

I am a father.