There are some milestones which, as a parent, give you pause. You stop, for a moment, in the day-to-day task of keeping your family afloat – steering the waka through storms, plugging any leaks, navigating as best you can – to turn and gaze at the great distance you’ve covered. You look to the horizon (and that mystical place just beyond it), all that water stretching out and away from you, and consider how far you have come.
A different horizon. This one cut across by the treetops of Hagley Park. You gaze out at them, leaning against a window, high up in a hospital room, your hands against the glass, arse bare as the nurse behind you prepares to jab you with an injection of testosterone.
Your midwife suspected something wasn’t right and sent you for an extra scan which revealed a baby that is far too small for 37 weeks. Better to get that baby out, rather than let nature take its course. We might not like the course She takes (though no one says this, of course).
So there you are, idly wondering just how tinted this window glass is, as you get jabbed with testerone that will help the baby’s underdeveloped lungs to cope.
“Can anyone see us?”, you ask the nurse.
“I shouldn’t think so.”
It’s just us and trees then – a dark and jagged line below the sky.
Another line. Also dark. This one traced on a long spool of paper.
A device is strapped to your belly that monitors fetal heart rate. Straight, then jagged. Straight, then jagged. A regular and pleasing rhythm. Except.
Except, there are worrying anomalies. Sharp drops out of nowhere. Steep cliffs that drop away into dangerous waters. Doctors consult the lines of paper with furrowed foreheads, and concerned faces.
Out the “sunroof” it is, then.
They say there are no straight lines in nature. They’re wrong but they say it nonetheless.
Your belly is lined. Like an earthquake damaged hill, fissures and furrows travelling roughly vertical up towards your navel.
Soon there will be a different line. Straight, horizontal and unnatural, bisecting them.
A nurse has shaved the tangle of your public hair to provide a clean slate, smooth and pale.
You are lying on your back in an operating room, craning your neck to try and catch a glimpse of him. You cannot feel the bottom half of your body. You are split in half and half again. One feeling half of you on an operating table, and other part of you, cord cut, off to the side, being prodded and examined.
You see movement, and occasional snatches of pink but your line of sight is obscured by the many trained medical professionals who are making checks and taking readings.
Finally, they put him in something that looks like it was designed by NASA and steer him near. A baby space-freighter with portholes. You reach an arm up and back and put your hand through one of the openings, his tiny fingers wrapping around yours.
And the line has grown longer, by one.
You are the latest links in a chain that connects him to all your ancestors and their ancestors and back, and back through time and evolutionary processes – an unbroken line to the beginning of everything.
He reaches through you to the past. You reach through him to the future.
Michelangelo should’ve painted you both on the Sistine Chapel. Maybe he did. Maybe that’s what he meant?
In this scenario which one of you is God?
The future is the dark and unseen horizon. Sometimes you worry how much further the line will continue. What storms await you all? Will the future rise up to meet you like a tide line? Will you float safely on?
But yours is an ocean-going waka hourua, double-hulled, meant for great journeys and you are a vigilant navigator, holding the line and scanning the horizon.