First Cry

He put the key into ignition and the car roared to life. He was too much in a hurry to realize he had forgotten his seatbelt. He wasn’t prepared for it. After all it was still a week before the due date of the birth of his first child. They had been planning it for months now, taking all the classes about handling the kids and other parenting classes. They did everything by the book and why they won’t. They didn’t want any stone left unturned for this day to be perfect. But it wasn’t, it wasn’t even close. While he was struck at his office, she was in the house waiting for him to come back. He had started doing extra shifts now they were going to have an extra mouth to feed. She didn’t mind but still wished they could spend more time together now as after the birth getting some private time might be of some problem at least for some time.

He raced past a red light. He normally would have stopped but this was an emergency, it was night time, no one’s going to notice if I jump a signal he said to himself. While they had practiced getting to the hospital more than a hundred times, he had mentally been on the same route a million times. They had the emergency kit planned with everything necessary inside it, everything mentioned by the instructor in one of the thousand classes they had attended. But you can only be so much ready as you don’t know when it is going to strike. It had been over fifteen minutes since he had received the call from the neighbors’ that his wife’s water broke and she was in labor and were rushing her to the hospital. They would have been around the parking by now he though judging by the time that had passed and the traffic at this time of the night.

By the time he reached the hospital, he knew she was probably inside the delivery room so he didn’t ask at the reception and ran directly towards the room. His neighbors were standing outside the room, he just ran towards them to ask how she was. They calmed him down and told him everything was all right but she hadn’t dilated much for the delivery to happen so it was going to take some time. She had been feeling a lot of pain so the doctors gave her a pain killer to calm her down. He thanked them for helping them out and escorted them out.

Now he was finally alone in a hospital full of diversified noises. He sat down on a chair directly in front of the door of the delivery room and just stared into blank space in front of him. it was just him and his thoughts left now that he pondered up on.

Both of them were orphans, grown up in the same orphanage with rooms literally a stone’s throw distance. He knew because they used to throw pebbles in each other’s room when they were younger. None of them knew what it felt like to have a parent. As long as either of them could remember, they had to take care of themselves otherwise no one would. The childhood friendship blossomed into love. In their own way, one of them completed the other. He was more focused on getting a better life to live in, while she was more focused to have a life with him. Both of them had a tough childhood, so the moment they decided to get married, they wanted to make sure they were going to be the best parents to their child they could possibly be. Only when you don’t have something is when you realize its actual worth. Both of them knew what it meant to have a protective hand of a parent over their head. He studied and became an architect and she an interior designer, both of them best at what they did. He designed houses, she designed homes. Like always, they had each other for the rest of their life.

Three months into their marriage they finally decided to try to start a family. A few months later, on a Sunday morning as he distinctly remembers, he was woken up after she almost jumped over him sleeping. He somehow managed to shake the last of the sleep from his eyes and saw her smiling over him. She wasn’t the prettiest girl he had ever seen on moments like these it didn’t matter to him if there was any other girl in the world except for her. He asked about what happened that she had to wake him up like she did, she kissed him on his forehead and then on his nose followed by a tender kiss on the lips and went straight to his ear and whispered “I’m pregnant” slowly. Happiness knew no boundary was just an expression for him until now. He picked her up swooned her across the room crying out he was going to be a father. It was the happiest moment in his life, yet.

They went to the doctor very next day and the doctor strictly gave him instructions to take extra care of her from now on since she was expecting. There was that day and there is this day, when his child is finally going to be born that he took all the duties of the house to himself, cooking, cleaning, everything. He made sure he attended all the pre-parental meetings. He started saving by working extra time now they had to pay for the education too. He made sure she took a walk every evening, even went with her almost every day.

All of that planned for the perfect day, the day the orphans became parents. It was now.

He crashed back into reality with the sound of a baby crying out loudly. Obviously his first thought was the sound came from his own baby but then he realized he was in a room full of crying infants each of them trying to make louder crying sounds and smellier poops than the other. He smiled to himself that his days of waking up late in the night to clean out the baby’s nappies were going to start. A nurse came in to inform him that his wife was finally in the delivery room and that he would be called on soon. He had imagined a thousand ways of how his life would have turned out but this, how it was presently paramounted all of them. After another few minutes nurse came out and called him inside. He got up from the chair he now realized he had been sitting on for the past two hours. It was almost early morning and the place was still buzzing as the peak time in the vegetable market. He tried walking as fast as he could but his world seemed to slow down tremendously somehow. Everything around him was in slow motion now. There wasn’t any sound anywhere, any crying babies, and no mothers crying harder to make their baby to stop crying. He just walked directly into the room and saw his wife laying on a special bed made for delivery purpose. He saw a baby, a small beautiful creature in the arms of the nurse and suddenly everything came back into its pace. He ran up to the nurse, took the baby. She smiled and said “It’s a boy” and handled the new born to him. The baby was still covered in blood and other fluids but looked like the most beautiful creature to ever breathe in the air of this earth. He just kept staring at the baby and didn’t realize that tears came running down from the ends of his eyes. He had never been so careful in his entire life while he was holding that little bundle of joy. He glanced over to his wife, she was exhausted but not in a bad way, a refreshing kind of way. She looked at him and smiled. He could see she didn’t have much strength but she still managed to open her mouth and say “He’s got your nose” and just smile after that.

He took his finger and brought closer to the baby. He was almost amazed to see how small babies are with their tiny feet and even tinier hands. The baby pulled out one hand and held his finger as tightly as he could hold. Just then the baby started to cry as if he was getting hungry. He had been waiting for the past eight and a half months to hear his baby’s first cry. While holding the baby as carefully as ever, he looked through the window to the sky and thanked god for he had brought the greatest joy to them as they could ever feel. It was the greatest moment of his life.