Today is my oldest child’s twenty-eighth birthday. Every year, the arrival of August 4 (feast of St. John Vianney—pray for priests!) sets off a similar routine:
-I express incredulity at his advancing age, which surely can’t be that much less than my own at this point. Then I yell at neighborhood kids to get off my lawn.
-There are group texts and phone calls with him and his six siblings, who, I never stop feeling blessed to note, all love one another.
-I mention on Facebook or in a conversation that this is the anniversary of the day I “became a father.”
-I get shirty corrections from well-meaning people who inform me that I became a father when he was conceived, because pro-life.
Okay.
Look, I am as hard-core about the full humanity of the unborn as anyone, even among other pro-life Catholics. I tend to favor embryo adoption, for instance, where many Catholic moralists say (and it may be the more probable opinion of the Church) that it’s impermissible.
But although it’s technically correct that someone becomes a parent at the moment of his or her first child’s conception, in the sense that the unborn child is a full human being with a mother and a father, there is nonetheless a hiddenness to that child’s time in the womb. He hasn’t yet come into the world; there’s a still-to-be-completed aspect to the whole arrangement.
This is surely why we celebrate Christmas as a specially solemn feast, even more so than the Annunciation (when the Lord was conceived) or the Visitation (when John the Baptist leapt in the womb at his presence). The Incarnation has already occurred; Mary is the mother of God. But it’s only at the Nativity that the shrouded, silent intimacy of pregnancy gives way to the visible, audible, unmistakably public presence of God made man, in the world.
Mary’s divine maternity, and the guardianship of God’s foster-father Joseph, become fully realized when Jesus is born. That’s why we devote whole seasons to preparing for and commemorating that birth.
And of course, it’s after a child is born that mother and father become fully initiated into all the subjective, practical, phenomenological aspects of parenthood—the love and care, the feedings and bodily fluids, the lost sleep and discipline and lifetime of worry that make even an adoptive parent a true father or mother. In a world where there is a sad and ever-growing distinction between being a dad or mom and being a mere baby-daddy or -mama, we shouldn’t let Pro-Life Prenatal Correctness bully us into ignoring that parenthood is as much about doing as being.
So happy birthday to Joe, my oldest boy, the man who made me a father twenty-eight years ago and who makes me proud every day. (And no, I don’t say “eldest”—that’s a topic for another post…)