Illustration by Drew Shannon
First Person is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines at tgam.ca/essayguide.
This week, readers share stories about fatherhood and what it means to them.
It’s three a.m. in Norway and something like six in the evening in Vancouver as I lay on the couch and call Canada. This call is a last-ditch effort to keep my eyes open another 45 minutes before I head back to the barn to check on the newborn. It’s calving season here in Flam, Norway, and I’m helping out at a friend’s farm. The last first-time calver just spilled her heavy burden, slippery and spluttering onto the dirty floor. I found them half an hour ago, the cow staring at her daughter. I bent down and picked up the calf, it was maybe 20 minutes old and held her in front of me as I walked backward to a dry pen. The mother grunted and followed, nudging her baby in my arms. I brought hay and water to mother and babe and walked slowly back to the house, pulled off my gloves sticky with afterbirth, then crawl onto the couch to call my sister.
I have always liked the word “calving.” Its simplicity and action, the breaking off and the pressing out. Often a cow stands up in the last moments of the birth, the calf hanging, halfway into this world, warm and steamy. She takes a step and the calf falls and like the splitting of an arctic glacier – the calf hits the ground and becomes something else entirely.
A few weeks before I left British Columbia, I found out I was going to be a father. It was cold in the Columbia Valley, maybe -25 C and Katie came inside to show me a plus sign on a pregnancy test.
“What does that mean?” I asked, unable to do the math that + = positive = baby.
We went for a long walk and three weeks later I left for Norway to work through the season of birthing, to watch bodies change, to see swollen vulvas and milk leaking on rubber mats. Leaving my partner to feel queasy, tired and alone.
Here on the farm, we get up every four hours to check on the cows. The barn is old and the concrete floor can kill a calf in a few hours if the temperature is below zero. Last year, when Katie was here with me, we found a calf nearly frozen on the floor. The heifers, or first-time mothers, sometimes don’t understand what’s happening and leave their baby covered in dirt and the yellow of their in utero home. Moaning, they walk back and forth along the length of the barn unsure of what has happened, unable to make sense of the new life lying there on the ground. The calf we found together was weak, wet and shaking as we gathered it into a towel, built a fire in the stove and took turns laying on the living room floor beside it, feeding it yellowy gold colostrum with a cracked plastic syringe. There is hardly a greater joy than waking up to the sound of little hooves trying to stand for the first time on a hardwood floor.
On the phone in the middle of my night, my sister and I talk about school, life, her girlfriend and apple trees. My sister and I don’t talk so often any more. We’re both busy and our lives that are different from each other’s now. Many years of me running back and forth to Norway for school or for work doesn’t help, nor does the nine-hour time difference; though I’m always glad when we talk. She was the first person I told about our baby-to-be. I drove from my home in B.C.’s interior to the city to see her; the first step en route to Norway. My sister and I were both uncomfortable and unsure about what it all meant as we sat in the front of my truck, smiling. Three black and white ultrasound photos on a long glossy strip lay on the seat between us.
Neither of us mention the baby in this call, although I know we’re both thinking about it. I hang up and head back down in the dark to the barn again, hoping that the newborn has been licked dry and is on her feet.
I think about being a father all the time here, surrounded by birth but with a total absence of father figures in the bovine form. Each night awake is one closer to the day when I finally understand what it will mean to be a dad. I open the gate and walk quietly into the birthing pen, where I see a small calf nuzzling a swollen udder. I smile, take a picture to send to Katie and then grab an armful of straw; hoping to create a nice warm space where finally, they can sleep.
Robbie Bankes lives in Parson, B.C.