This post is taken from the weekly newsletter “Darons Daronnes” on parenting, which is sent every Wednesday at 6 pm You can subscribe to this newsletter for free by following this link.
When I was born, in 1981, my father was not there. He had probably gone to “smoke a cigarette,” “get something to eat,” or maybe “buy a newspaper,” and when he returned, I was born. I have not found any global statistics, but it seems to me that this absence was not so unusual at that time. In a research carried out in an Italian maternity hospital, it is specified that “Men’s participation in natural childbirth increased from 70% in 1984 to 83% in the late 1990s, reaching 94% in the 2000s”.
The immediate consequence of her absence was that I experienced my first ex utero moments alone with my mother. He probably took me in his arms, felt my weight, my heat, and I must have discovered the contact of his skin, the smell of his body. If I think about this it is because of an anecdote told by clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst Kevin Hiridjee, author of What is a father? (Fayard, 320 pages, 21.90 euros). She works in a Parisian maternity hospital, where she receives parents and future parents at their request and, sometimes, the nursing staff. He regularly goes to the delivery room, where he witnesses the first moments of families’ lives. He told me that one day he met a father who explained that he had shaved his chest so he could receive his baby skin to skin (without tickling his nose). As close to your meat as possible. This image shocked me.
I asked myself the following: Does being there from the first moment, and being offered to pamper your newborn, feeling it breathe against you, forever change the relationship between parents and their children’s bodies? Does this experience open the floodgates of maternal tenderness in them, which will never close again?
This made me think of a parallel in another area: we know that a long paternity leave is the best way to rebalance the distribution of domestic and parental tasks in a couple, especially in a staggered manner. Being there alone all day means being forced to wonder about the brand of diaper that irritates the bottom, watching the baby regurgitate early milk, emptying the overflowing laundry basket. Here we are also opening floodgates that (I hope!) will never close again. The mother is no longer the only one responsible for the home.
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