Nicholas Hamblin pats the back of his baby son Liam positioned across his chest and comfortingly hums John Legend’s All Of Me. Liam starts to coo in harmony with his father. Before you know it, he has fallen asleep.
“When Liam wants to go to sleep and he is fussing or fretting I just hold him and he holds on to my face, or he gives me a hug and he kisses my face and it just changes everything,” said the 31-year-old father.
Now seven months old, Liam is the child Nicholas and his wife Bianca dreamed of from the day they were married and spent the first eight years of the marriage trying to conceive, even believing at some point it would never happen.
Recalling the frustration they both endured in the attempt to become parents, Nicholas said he and his wife began to have doubts about their ability to conceive. “We had actually planned to go to have ourselves checked out to find out if we could have children.” They had even had gone as far as making up their minds that “if we can’t have children then maybe we will adopt a child”.
Then they stopped trying.
Therefore theirs was unspeakable joy when two weeks after their ninth wedding anniversary, Liam was born. Conception had taken place the same week they had moved into a house on their own, away from Bianca’s parents where they had lived from the day they got married. As much as they wanted to be parents, Nicholas now says they had hoped parenthood would happen when they were living on their own.
The news that he was about to become a father was “joy, extreme joy, because it was something that we were looking forward to for all this time.
At one point we just said when it does happen, it happens; we are not going to push it, we are not going to force it.”
He could not contain his excitement to find out Bianca was pregnant:?“This was a reality; we are going to have a baby. It was just incredible. There is nothing that can describe how I felt about it.”
That excitement was tempered, however, by concern about the doctor’s pronouncement that this was a “high risk” pregnancy given Bianca’s medical challenges.
Nicholas related going the full journey with his wife in the months to follow as she endured “a gruelling pregnancy” with complications that forced her admission to hospital several weeks before she was due to deliver.
“The plan was to induce birth and they actually tried to induce on four or five occasions,” he said.
Surgery was not the doctor’s preferred route and holding on to the tradition of womanhood and childbirth, Bianca herself had wanted so much to give birth naturally.
A Caesarian section would have to be a last resort.
The day Bianca was to be induced, Nicholas arrived at the hospital early.
“I came down to the hospital, and she was already in the delivery suite and she was nervous. They started giving her the drugs and she had started having contractions. I left to return and when I got back into the delivery suite she was being prepped for surgery because they had decided to do an emergency C-section because labour was not progressing and they were worried.”
Anxiousness and anticipation immediately turned to fear which intensified when he was instructed to put on scrubs and asked to sit and wait until he was called into the operating theatre. It did not help that he had heard his wife crying out in pain.
He was finally ushered into the operating theatre to witness the delivery of his son.
“Actually seeing him for the first time, hearing his first cry, was something I will always remember. To see him come out, to hear him cry, it is just something I can’t describe. It was so much joy, so much happiness, the fear melted away.”
His attention quickly shifted to his wife, who still needed to be stitched up.
Foremost in his mind were thoughts about the possibility of losing the girl he had had first met on the telephone in a three-way conversation with a mutual friend. They were both 11-year-old kids and maintained that friendship through to the teenage years and high school for five years before they would eventually have their first face-to-face meeting. A one-year hiatus was followed with a rekindling of the friendship when they were both attending the Samuel Jackman Prescod Polytechnic, an experience which served to foster a deeper more serious relationship that would eventually lead to marriage.
“Fatherhood has changed me in a way that I did not really expect. I have more of a sense of responsibility, a sense that we are caring for a child that we brought into this world,” Nicholas said.
“There are lots of things that I now have to learn to do for him, because I grew up without a father or a father figure in my life. But I had a lot of positive male role models in my life and I can take my experiences from that and pass them on to him.
He added, “the really big change in my life is knowing that I have someone that is there depending on me to be the best man that I can be so that he in turn can be a better man in his life.”
Asked what he liked most about being a father, Nicholas’ face lit with a broad smile and he answered: “The time I spend playing with my son, doing things with and for my son . . . when I take a playful nibble on his stomach and he starts to chuckle.”
For Nicholas, the close bond between him and his son, especially when Liam reaches from his mother to his father’s arms to get him to sleep, is priceless.
“It does not matter that I may be tired and I may have been saying at that point I would like that he goes to sleep so I can get some rest. All of that goes away once he just hugs me, or he kisses me or he smiles at me. I just forget everything. He takes away all of my worries, all of my fears.”
Similarly he opens his eyes in the morning and his glance goes straight towards his son. When he smiles and Liam smiles back “that tells me he realises ‘this is my dad’”, Nicholas said.
“What I want most for him is to be the best man that he can be. I can’t force him to be something that he does not want to be but I hope that I can teach him all the values that I have learnt.”