The colour corridor: My first steps into fatherhood
Not a single word that anyone ever said to me prepared me for how different the world looked on the day after my son’s birth. As I left the warm, filtered air of the hospital entrance and entered the bitter cold air of Toronto in January with my newborn son sat snugly in his car seat and my partner limping by my side, the world was both brighter and darker than it had been when we’d entered 36 hours earlier. Each step was a first for him, and for me. The streetlights had a magical twinkle to them, the wind, though sharp on my skin, had life in it.
But as with many stories involving magic there were spectres hanging in the air. With this tiny, defenseless, prematurely born infant on my arm it was so much easier to see the dangers the world posed – a sudden attack from a passerby or a rogue driver ignoring a red light. Afterall, life and death are each other’s natural dancing partners, one leading the other with onlookers scarcely knowing where one begins and the other ends.
The light and the dark both stood in stark contrast to the grey world we’d just left. Hospitals, by and large, are drab places. They’re sterile environments, yet nothing about the human drama that exists inside their walls is sterile. Life and death tango, waltz, and breakdance through the halls, but for thousands of people it’s also their place of work. It is, when you think about it, a strange place to mark one of the major moments in your life. In those grey walls, as my son was handed to me for the first time, my life exploded into vivid technicolour.
But those walls became a character in the first hours of my son’s life. The clock ticked and the walls dripped into each moment we had together as a new unit of three. Being surrounded by people whose conversations comprised of work gossip, scheduling issues, and small talk, drained me of some of that vivid colour. The grey began seeping in and I felt the first real stirrings of worry. In a place so methodical and efficient, I began to feel that there was a right way to be a father and that I was certain to do it wrong.
Sleeping on an uncomfortable chair in a shared room, watching the gentle rise and fall of Smith’s chest, listening to Lindsay’s purring snore, I felt ready to wear the responsibility of my family but felt lost knowing how that was meant to be done. With that feeling quickening my heart I did the only thing I know how to do in such a situation, I walked; I gave mobility to thoughts that had begun to loop in perpetual motion.
This however is the story of a Covid birth. There was no fresh air reprieve, I had only the grey walls of the maternity ward to wander. So I ambled. With nowhere to go I juggled the conflicting hopes and fears I had for myself, my partner, and my son. I mulled over the endless hours of unsolicited advice that had been thrown our way, I replayed the nurse who shooed me away for changing my first diaper “too slowly”, and I remembered the physical feeling of being torn between where to be in the operating room – I’d paced back and forth from my precious son as he took in his first lungfuls of air to my beloved partner who lay shivering on the operating table with her insides exposed.
And then, mid thought, I stopped. In this world of grey, filled with shuffling new parents and methodical professionals I stumbled upon what felt like an undiscovered wonder of the world: the colour corridor.
Walking the colour corridor
One right turn had landed me in an oasis of colour. Even in my memory the colour of the walls escapes me, but the artwork doesn’t. I strolled down 20 feet of corridor flanked on either side by explosively colourful paintings labeled blue, indigo, green, red, yellow, and purple, each accompanied with a short description of the underlying emotions associated with the colour – passion and love for red, calm and introspection for blue. The paintings were simple in nature, with a core colour as a backdrop and flecks and swirls of differing shades of the colour throughout. Describing them in detail would do no justice to the expressiveness and mood of the paintings and in fact my mind has scarcely retained the details. What remains is the feeling, the colour. To me in that grey environment, fraught with new worries, the colours were a soothing balm that brought me back to myself.
On that first visit I stayed in the colour corridor for some time, moving from painting to painting looking at each one closely and then stepping back to take in the effect of all that colour surrounding me, embracing me, nurturing me. I knew that in the coming days and weeks it would be my job to embrace and nurture both my son and my partner as they found their own space to make sense of each other, love one another, and recover from their shared effort. But for 30 minutes I surrendered to my own feelings of doubt and uncertainty, explored what it meant to be me in this extraordinary moment, and allowed myself to be held together by colour. In the colour corridor I found my old strength and resilience and single mindedness returning. I’d paused for a moment in colour and it had evaporated the grey that had seeped in to my first 24 hours as a father.
In the next 12 hours before we left the hospital and I discovered just how much more light and dark my eyes were now trained to see, I returned to the colour corridor five or six times but never alone. At first I brought my son, giving his mum a chance to rest and recover. On our first trip I’d felt nervous crossing the threshold of our room with him in my arms. It felt wrong, as if I wasn’t allowed to take him from the room, as if I were breaking rules I’d never seen or understood.
But as we ambled through the grey I was greeted with smiles and warm congratulations from doctors, nurses, and cleaning staff moving through their days. It was only in that moment that I realized my son was exactly that, my son. He went where I took him, fatherhood isn’t shaped by an idea or parenting books, it’s shaped by fathers. It was one of those insights that shouldn’t be an insight, yet you’re so close to the problem that the obvious answer evades you for far longer than you’d care to admit.
When we reached the colour corridor together, Smith’s eyes were open and he sat cozily in my arms unaware of what drew me to that place in that moment. However, the calm and joy that I’d felt the moment his cry had pierced the part of my heart that seemed to have been set aside exclusively for him came flooding back in that space. His ocean-blue eyes reflected back the colours as I talked to him aimlessly, soothing him with my voice; and his body curled more tightly to mine as I danced and spun him on our private dancefloor set apart from the rest of the world.
The remaining trips to the colour corridor were a mix of the two of us and the three of us. Lindsay and I talked gently about the new love and appreciation we had for each other, and our new, shared definition of perfection – our son. Where the rest of the hospital was functional, the colour corridor was a sanctuary for us to explore our new identity as a family unit, a unit built on a foundation of two people dedicated to each other and the home we’d created in each other. Somewhere out there is the person who decided to put up those paintings and the person who painted them, to both I owe an enormous debt of gratitude. In a moment of personal and shared transformation I needed a space that spoke to who I was, what I appreciated and cherished and the colour corridor delivered.
I have always believed that people are too readily told to focus on their inner life as if it is distinct from the outer world. The colour corridor brought that lesson, and fatherhood, into focus for me. In a place that felt outside of the grey, process-filled environment of a hospital ward it was easier for me to see that fatherhood, for my son at least, was ours to define together. It’s a fixed word but it’s meaning will change as I change, as he changes, and as we navigate the technicolour sparks and the night-dark spots, the magic and the spectres in the everydayness of family life.
