The Smell of Fatherhood

I'm in an unreal place and time.  Our son Aidan was born just a little over a week ago.  There are a million things I could say about this miraculous thing that has happened to me, but I thought I'd write about something that took me by surprise just the other day.

We'd been through the Hoping (Hannah's heart and mine aligned with a new wonder) the Waiting (a tough and totally necessary lesson from God about not-having-to-be-in-control-of-everything-all-the-time), the Happening (wonderful, terrifying, bewildering, fascinating, transforming) and the first stages of the Adjusting (something like giving in to a very persuasive person who doesn't have to do any actual persuading).

Then the other day, something akin to normality returned when I left my new wee family for a few hours to take the bus into Edinburgh.  A humdrum journey on a humdrum bus with a humdrum driver and lots of other humdrummers lost in their thoughts and counting the humdrum minutes til their destination.   I was feeling groggy and attempting to slip into a commuter-coma, when something unexpected crept up on me - a sensation I imagine like the Flaming Lips' tried to express in their 'softest bullet ever shot'.  The sensation was this:  I could smell him.

Perhaps its because I devote so many of my energies to thinking, talking, listening and watching that I always seem to underestimate to power of smell.  As such I'm constantly being ambushed by my olfactory sense.  A smell can awaken emotion, nostalgia, longing, just as much as music can - perhaps even more.  Certainly there's something somehow more visceral, less rarified about the effect a smell can have.  I guess we tend to associate smell with negative feelings - the warning sign of gone-off milk.  The sad tang of disinfectant in old folk's homes.  Farts.

But the smell of which I suddenly became aware while slouching along on the 38 bus yesterday wasn't like any other smell I've encountered - consciously or unconsciously.  Of course I've smelled babies before.  It's a curious musty, high, sweet odour which all babies have.  I think this (allied with visual cuteness) is another of nature's ways of ensuring we fall, head over heels in love with them.  But this smell - this particular variety of the millions of subtle variations of baby-scent reverberating around the nostril hairs of fathers throughout the world - THIS smell was unmistakably the smell of my son.  It was as if, though he is only a few days old in the eyes of Man, it was as if his very presence was lingering, soul-like just above my skin.

The Old Testament repeatedly calls for sacrifices which produce a pleasing aroma to the LORD.  I suspect this is both symbolic and literal.  As the smell of roasting meat rises mouth-wateringly to the holy nostrils of the angelic realm, so the aroma of - that is the result of - righteousness rises from our acts of obedience and love to the nostrils of our heavenly Father.  Catholic and Eastern churches seem to understand something of this in their multi-sensory worship, even if their use of incense might seem churchy and affected.  I still remember it from my childhood - the soft clack of the incense burner as the priest swung it back and forth on its long metal chain, wafting exotic vapours over an expectant congregation.  Is God pleased with this pungency in worship?  Perhaps, yes.  Perhaps only when our love for our fellow man is equally fragrant.

All of this of course was far from my mind when I was gently jolted out of my mindlessness and surprised by the scent of my son.  I simply breathed deeply the smell of fatherhood.  From today, everything is new.