patrescence

If I'm not at work, am I still an engineer?

When does the engineer-ness start to disappear?

Is it when I forget how to write a recursive function?

Or, when Human Resources terminates my contract?

Or could it be, maybe, when I close my laptop everyday at 5pm?

So at what point in time did I become a father?

When did I gain my father-ness?

Was it when she gasped her first breath?

Or, further back, when my sperm merged with an ovum?

Or, further still, when my now-wife first found refuge for her anguish on my overworn t-shirt?

"How does it feel?"

I don't know how it feels.

I just have a stark awareness of the change that looms.

An openness to the truth that things are always changing.

Just as the fabric of the water constantly bends beneath a tufted duck.

How does any change feel?

Surely it's a matter of temperament; of expectations?

What could have prepared me for the arrival of her infinity?

No knowledge readied me for the innocent scent on the top of her head.

No advice foretold the soft, taut thread that runs from the back of my throat through my heart and into hers.

No musician could have imagined the pattern of her ostinato or the cadence of her crescendo.

Who warned me of the crescent-shaped mementos on the back of my hand; forged

when Mummy's fingertips transmuted that unspoken peak of pleasure into that ritualised valley of pain?