A Special Day

It is my daughter’s birthday. 8 years ago today around 7 in the morning she was born. I had been at the hospital all night. It was a long labour. The night before I had just returned home after a day waiting at my wife’s side. The razor had hardly started its downward strokes on my face when the phone rang. My wife had just been moved to the delivery suite. I could hardly believe it. Frantically I rang a taxi but those depots that were open said it would be an hour or more. No use to me, I ran to the hospital dreading that I might not be present for my daughter’s entry into the world of West Belfast.

Four months earlier she had experienced something of that intolerant world from her mother’s womb when a noisy crowd had assembled at our home to shout in her mother’s face that they did not approve of some writing I had done. We wondered about the type of environment our daughter was to be born into. We did not expect our local MP to stand up for her rights. It was his party that had brought the crowd to her as she gestated deep within her mother.

The evening previous, awaiting my daughter’s arrival, I sat beside her mother as she lay in her hospital bed, both of us reading an attack made on her in the local party paper. Her poetry had upset its management much more than its attack annoyed us. That was how it was then. The atmosphere was invariably stressful and intimidating. When our daughter was born it all seemed to dissipate. In reality it didn’t; we were just oblivious to it. When she first emerged I have a memory of looking into her eyes and she into mine. I like to think that I was the first person she saw and also the first person to see her. I don’t like to remind myself that at that age she probably could not see further than the end of her nose.

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then. When I look at her today, so grown up, speaking, reading and writing in Irish, composing stories, reading bedtime tales to her younger brother, talkative, engaging, inquisitive, creative, I marvel at the complexity of the human condition, the highest form of life. What makes it all the more wondrous is that it didn’t require the assistance of a supernatural being to make it all happen.

She is brought up to think for herself. She asks all manner of probing questions many of which I have no answers for. She talks to me about the universe and how it came about. She is not subject to any religious influence but is free to opt for a religious persuasion if she should ever choose to. When she asks me my view I tell her it. Likewise with politics, she can develop whatever perspective she wants. I always tell her what I believe and explain to her that she is under no reason to share it. A voracious reader like her mother, she devours books at an incredible pace, and currently loves Nancy Drew, Laura Ingalls Wilder and Horrid Henry. At five she had her first writing published as part of an edited collection in a book. We hope it is the first of many.

I had intended taking her to her first Liverpool game as a present. As an alternative my wife suggested a computer for her as an aid to her education. Liverpool drew 1-1 with Manchester City. I am relieved we went for the computer. A draw in a bland game is hardy the first memory of the Kop a father wants his daughter to have.

Tonight when my wife reads some of her establishment-rattling poetry to me we will both reflect on that morning eight years ago when our lives changed forever. Children are irreplaceable.