Day 152 – in a pensive, heavy mood. Just finished watching Sometimes in April and I felt as if I were being squeezed – my chest tight, emotion high, tears flowing. The visceral shock of facing death and of seeing death, even on a 13” laptop screen on the living room couch, surprised me. I was also completely surprised by the incredible emotion that welled up in me upon watching and reminiscing about the killing of children, of mere children and babies, in Rwanda.
At one point, I paused the movie and closed my eyes, imagining the little girl sleeping in her crib just down the hall from where I sat … blissfully ignorant of any of that … and perhaps at the same time innocently vulnerable to all that. That is what eats at a parent’s soul – the terrible possibilities of your own child suffering an unknown fate that would leave you bereft. I never felt that before until tonight. All the sleepless nights, the screaming hours, the crying days, they are all nothing in comparison to the fear that lies just beneath the surface of fatherhood – that my child could somehow fall victim to something terrible. The ultimate injustice, and one that somehow I wouldn’t be able to prevent.
A part of me feels numbed right now – not as a result of having relived 6 difficult but adrenaline and emotion-filled months of working in Rwanda. No, I feel numbed instead from the 12 years since I left Rwanda and stopped working for a cause other than my own. Everything has revolved around my own selfish ego since then and I’ve felt a part of me become numb to places and people and events.
Darfur, Banda Aceh, Kashmir, New Orleans. Places on a map. I am now like the people I decried in 1994, those whom I judged incapable of seeing what I saw in Rwanda. Oblivious, uncaring, pre-occupied with more important or relevant things. And when I look at my little girl, this little thing that has only lived through 152 sunrises and sunsets, I tell myself that she will not be like that. No. She will not be one of them … she will not be like me.
That conversation, I’ve come to realize, is what fatherhood holds in store for me each and every day. This is a conversation that will become very familiar, on what my child will or will not be, what she will and will not do, how she will and will not act. Her helplessness as a baby is why I have the gall, of course, to think this way. But it gives me both power and fear – a fear of not being able to help her when she is most in need, and when she is most at risk.
It’s a silly fear, I suppose – picturing her in Rwanda as a baby and wondering what I would have been able to do for her had we been living there at the time of the genocide. But silly as it may be, it still brings tears to my eyes. My baby daughter. My only daughter. My helpless little bundle of joy. I am your father, and even if I don’t yet know all the responsibility that will bring, I welcome it. And I hope … I hope beyond anything else, that I will be able to protect you from what I saw 12 years ago, and from what I saw again tonight.
