Any Given Son

Abstract

Any Given Son Eduardo Halfon (bio) Keywords Eduardo Halfon, fatherhood, circumcision, birth, parenting I was there for the seven hours of labor of my son’s birth. I saw him enter the world. I heard his first cry. I felt on my fingers his first breath. Still dressed in blue scrubs, I cut or rather pinched the umbilical cord. And with my son cradled in my arms, still pale and bloated and tightly swaddled in a light-yellow blanket, I looked at him as if I was looking at somebody else’s son. At any given son. The feeling of motherhood is automatic and primitive, I told myself, perhaps to explain or justify my immediate absence of love. But father-hood, as Joyce wrote in Ulysses, is unknown to man. It is a mystical state, he wrote, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. In any case, I didn’t feel that mystical state or apostolic succession until the following day, when the doctor arrived very early in the morning to perform on my son, there, in that same hospital room in Nebraska, his circumcision. It was the first question I thought of as I looked at the ultrasound and learned it would be a boy: to circumcise or not to circumcise? We read a lot. We discussed it constantly among ourselves. We spoke about it with friends, with family, with doctors and nurses. One gynecologist told us, in an almost evangelical tone, that he’d circumcised his first-born, but not his second, and that the second one had suffered for it. Although he didn’t specify exactly how his second son had suffered, I instantly imagined biblical plagues and divine punishments. According to the most recent studies, there is no evidence that a circumcision will help avoid infections (nor, I think, biblical plagues and divine punishments). According to other studies, there is evidence that a circumcision lessens a man’s sexual pleasure, something that the medieval rabbi and philosopher Maimonides had already warned about almost a millennia ago, in his book The Guide for the Perplexed. Herodotus wrote that the ancient Egyptians would circumcise for reasons of hygiene, although there’s also the hypothesis that they considered the circumcised man worthy of the most esoteric secrets, of myths and spells reserved only for the initiated. The ancient Greeks, on the other hand, valued the foreskin. As did the ancient Romans, who [End Page 328] even protected it by law. Ever since the pact between Abraham and God, Jews are Jews because they’re circumcised (the lack of a foreskin, as the Nazis knew, has always been part of our identity), but it surprised me to learn that not all Jews have practiced it. Moses, disobediently, chose not to circumcise his sons; the ritual of circumcision was completely ignored during the forty days in the desert; and Theodore Herzl, the spiritual father of the State of Israel, decided not to circumcise his only son, Hans, born in 1891. Yet as I studied and read over the historical and scientific and religious documents, I kept thinking of the first time I ever saw the uncircumcised penis of another boy, while we were all showering after swim class in school. I remember the cruel laughter and insults of all the other boys, who from that day on called him Batman. The brief procedure in the Nebraska hospital lasted only a few minutes. And I didn’t even see it. I stayed outside the room, standing in the hallway, listening to his cries, contemplating the possibility of running back in and snatching the scalpel from the doctor’s hand and yelling at her to please leave my son alone. Whatever our reasoning for his circumcision—fear, aesthetics, tradition, hygiene, avoiding future infections or biblical plagues—it was us, his mother and I, who made the decision. A definitive, irreversible decision. And standing by myself in the white cold hallway, I finally started to feel the weight of being a father. For the first time I’d decided something as a father. And I understood, in a categorical or perhaps even mystical way, that my son’s penis, from that moment...