This is my response to this week’s Flashback Track Friday prompt, where we were asked to:

Share something you didn’t like.

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Stagnant. Nothing had moved for a while.

Twelve hours, to be precise, since the epidural. Not counting the twenty hours before, as my wife’s resolve steadily crumbled, step by step accepting increasing pain relief.

“We need to get the baby out”, pipes a voice. How can we argue? Long ago, we knew we had no control. A package on a conveyor. Nobody to fight our corner. Every plan tossed aside by the experts.

I am hastily presented a set of grubby scrubs. “Put these on”. Over my clothes. I can’t help but notice the contrast as we enter the gleaming theatre. So spotless, it is… clinical. But we are hurried. Sterility a façade. Wife, still conscious, is disappointed. This isn’t her vision, either.

Fifteen more minutes of anaesthesia and we are done. A wail. I meet my daughter for the first time.

She is passed to me and I cradle her in my arms, awestruck at the new creation. For the first time, she shares an unfavourable opinion, taking her first piss on my shabby garb.

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I was very much looking forward to fatherhood but with hindsight, probably the only thing my daughter and I would agree is that I was lousy at it.