Happy 18th, Sid — Writer & traveller

Our son Sidney turns 18 on Monday. If I could, I’d come to his birthday party and do the egg bag trick but that’s a life skill I haven’t mastered yet. It’s far more difficult than the Nutbush, another life skill worth knowing and last performed at Sid’s sixth birthday party, by invitation.

The phone call re Sid’s birth came early on Saturday morning, mid-winter 2006. Congratulations. You’re a dad. He’s a boy!

Maggie had stayed by Tania’s side overnight. She drove home afterwards, fed the animals, picked me up on her way through. We spent the trip talking about how strange we felt, how lucky Tania was to get pregnant first go, what a relief it was that the pregnancy and birth happened without complication.

We got to the hospital, went straight to the room where Tania waited, and there he was, our baby boy, an eight pound bundle of pure joy whose presence stopped us in our tracks, made us catch our breath and process the enormity of his littleness. Tania still had a canula in the back of her hand, Sid was wrapped in a blue and pink flannelette blanket.

You can hold him, Tania said. I’ll take a photo, Maggie said. So there we stood, Tania and I, forming a coalition of arms to cradle our new-born son.

Initially, I hoped Sid would be called Liam. I liked the Irishness of that name, even more so because it was a diminutive of my father’s name, William. But Tania had settled on Sidney, named after the man who had cared for Maggie when she was a child. I was fine with Tania’s choice: it articulated an important connection. Besides, I was thrilled to learn that Sid’s second name was Dominic. That wasn’t a consolation prize, it was an unexpected gift.

A few weeks later, Maggie and Tania sent a home-made card to family and friends. Ours came with a limerick:

Dear Dom and Mal. Thank you for your precious gift of wrigglies that swim so swift. Your son is sweet, your son is loud, if it was a screaming match we’d all be proud. Thank you for our son so tender, If he poops much more it’s return to sender. From satan’s spawn to the cutest cherub seen I fear we’ve bred a drama queen. Sidney Dominic is in the building. Weight 8lbs. Height 52cm. Lung capacity 1000 litres. Open for adulation! Love, Maggie, Tania, Whoopi and the Man.

In many ways, it felt like we’d pulled a rabbit from a hat. I don’t mean to say Sid was rabbittish in any way, nor do I dismiss the fundamentals of conception and birth. It’s more that becoming a father was something I thought would never happen, and when it did, there was a kind of magic in it, as if we’d defied the laws of gravity.

These things ran through my mind recently when I read about a magician named De Biere, the Prince of Entertainers. He was famous in the 1930s for performing the egg bag trick, a clever piece of theatre involving appearance, disappearance and re-appearance.

I imagined showing up at Sid’s 18th birthday party to do the egg bag trick. It was an unusual fantasy: I have neither tails or top hat, nor an invitation. But it led me to the second thought, which was:

It’s metaphor. It’s presence and absence. The egg bag trick embodies any and all relationships that are contingent on coincidence and circumstance, biology and intention, certainly a little magic, possibly the utterance of abracadabra or the invocation of a name.

More explanation may be needed to make sense of all that. In the meantime, the message I have for my adult son is a simple one.

Happy 18th birthday, Sid. Have a wonderful celebration and a year full of adventure. Know that you have a father who thinks of you always and loves you forever.

Dad xxxx