The Rainbow (Frerard) [underwater_sky]

September - Last Words (Part Four)

            I marveled in Paloma. Over the next few days, when I really got to know her outside of her birth, I maintained no expectations. She was her own separate person, and I tried to stick with that fact, even if all she seemed to do was scream, cry, shit, and eat. Oh, and throw up. She did that a lot, too. But she did each of these tasks in her own way, I told myself and all the other adults around us. She was shitting with distinct character, I was sure of it. All Vivian could do was look at me and shake her heard.

            "You're a father, Frank. Plain and simple. No one else could say that but you," she teased me. I was beginning to really like the way that "father" and "dad" were sounding on people's tongues. I would test out new names and different variations of dad on Paloma to try and get it right before we ended up using it all the time. I would say "Daddy Frank" and wait for her response and ended up deciding that this got the most gurgles in her throat. It was completely unoriginal and I knew that I had made fun of Brian and Ryan for taking the same route with their names for their son. I felt like a hypocrite, but apparently all new parents felt like hypocrites, at least, according to Vivian. She had gone through the same string of worries and status as a parent that I was going through in those first few days.

            "I wanted Cassandra to call me Vivian, like everyone else. I never wanted to buy the baby snuggly that strapped to my chest so I could carry her around. I wanted to avoid pastel colors and loud, annoying toys. But that was wrong, definitely wrong," she had told me. She was often here in the mornings with us, before I headed out to work and would stay until her first lecture at eleven in the morning. She held Paloma this day, making faces at my daughter and getting her to mimic the response. I watched and held up one of the toys in pastel colors that Mikey had given us and waved it in front of Paloma's line of vision.

            "What changed?"

            "Good question. You can never really get attached to your opinions, with children or not. If you do, you end up becoming the person that's ranting on the street corner because no one else will listen to you. Real life requires compromise. It doesn't mean that your first opinion was wrong, only if you hold onto it when you know it doesn't work anymore."

            I nodded, and she passed my daughter off to me so she could see Hunter, and called me dad once more before she left the room. I was probably going to have to get used to this feeling. As I said "Daddy Frank" out loud a few more times, and heard her respond to each of them, I knew that it would get easier sooner rather than later. Hunter was still working through what he wanted to be called, and although I still liked the way that My Hunter sounded, he was probably going to take a similar moniker that I was. My Hunter would have just been too much and he would have looked like the cool dad by sheer name comparison alone.  "Daddy Hunter" was still pretty awesome, I had to admit, and I realized that Hunter was definitely going to take on the cool dad role anyway. How many kids could say that their father had given birth? I couldn't compete with that at all!

            But apparently, more and more men were now being able to say they had given birth and it was being recognized as something real. I had been surprised when Lydia had told me about her prior experience with this, especially since it did not appear to be reflected in any stories up until this point. But Hunter assured me, as he worked away in the days following his own experience, that this was not an isolated incident. We were a part of something much bigger than that. He had been working on a special for the magazine about transgender birth and was loading it with facts, arguments, and speculations for the future in addition to his own side story. It helped him to contextualize the many bizarre things that had just happened beyond the sobbing in disbelief that we had both done at the beginning. In the days after his recovery, he began to write gibberish in the mornings again, and then began to turn that gibberish into articles. It seemed like whenever I was up with Paloma in the early morning (her favorite times seemed to be from three until dawn), he was always in his room, typing away on his computer. He was writing so many articles now that I had started to tell him he needed his own magazine, or at least, a book deal.