Cutting the Cord

My father used to tell me this story about the night I was born. I suppose for the years he was around it was quite an entertaining yarn, a demonstration of his aloofness to the important things in life which was part of the reason we all loved him. But after he left for good the story became another reason to leave his principals if not the man behind.

The first time I recall the story was after my seventh birthday. He made another late appearance after all my friends had been collected, staggering in with beer on his breath and snatching one of the leftover pineapple and cheese kebabs from the banquet my mother had lovingly prepared. He looked over the rest of the food on the table, egg and cress sandwiches, cheese footballs and the remains of a strawberry trifle clinging to the side of it’s bowl but dismissed them all.

“Good party lad?” He asked chewing and speaking at the same time, “Where’s your mother?”

After placing drunken lips on my mother’s cheek as she stood by the kitchen sink he sat down opposite me and started.

 “Shall I tell you what I was doing seven years ago?”  He told me that the telephone had woken him up at 2am. It was the nurse from the hospital saying that my mother’s waters had broken and it would soon be time. Any normal man receiving that news you would think would have immediately jumped out of bed, putting on any clothes he could find any rush out into the darkness to be with his wife. But not my father, instead he described an enormous hunger that came over him, a hunger so great that he went into the kitchen and prepared himself a momentous breakfast of sausages, eggs, mushrooms and fried bread. He would need it for the day ahead he said, there was never any nice food in hospitals. This was even more surprising as he was a man that never cooked, for us or himself.  He took his time to satisfy himself and of course was late getting to the hospital where he encountered the unadulterated wrath of my mother who was already in the late stages of labour.

But knowing what I know now I don’t really buy the breakfast story. I think we all know the reason for the delay going to the hospital. When the phone rang that night he didn’t go into the kitchen and make a breakfast because he was entertaining in the bedroom, on sheets washed, dried and ironed by my mother several days before.  Because while I was pushing through my mother’s vaginal canal he was doing some pushing of his own into a woman called Alice, the same Alice he lived with for a year or so before groveling back home.

Apparently they asked him at the hospital if he wanted to cut the cord, but he said he was feeling too queasy and had to sit down. I think the blood was too much for him. Perhaps he didn’t want to cut the cord because at that point he would have assumed joint responsibility, the child no longer just the mother’s concern. I know it’s impossible, I couldn’t have known then I was just a baby of course. But I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know I was destined to live my life differently from my father, a less selfish one; a kind of life where I would help other people first before helping myself. I would pay for it of course, just as my mother had before me.