the intimacy of fatherhood

I missed being around the first six months of Boobee's life, him being born in the States, me working in Ghana and unable to see him. He seemed wary of me when we first met, not that I minded, we sort of circled around each other, who was this intimate stranger? The first time his over-ambitious mother left us together to go to a dinner party, Boobee was alternately unhappy and distraught...of course, he was still largely breast-fed then, and the combination of his mother's absence, my cluelessness, my deep voice, not his mother's calming tones, was driving him crazy. And even in all of that stress, it didn't take too long for us to bond. I could feel a certain sensation of absence most mornings before I picked him up. It felt as though there was a hollow he fit into directly, and I experienced it as an incompleteness.