I’m a working-class poet and this means I have less than a thousand dollars to my name, no clear idea of next month’s income, and when I asked my cousin for the money he owed me he sent me a screenshot of his account with $2 in it, and when I asked the bank for a personal loan they said no. All of which makes the amount of money and time I spent getting my diagnosis truly exorbitant; close to two grand, over the course of a year. Nonetheless, it needed to happen, and it wouldn’t have been possible without my partner, Hannah, and the love that we have for each other. Coming from similarly impoverished backgrounds, we provide the care we deny ourselves. For all her long-ignored health problems, I insist she gets the help she needs, and for mine, the same. It is only through living with her that I realised how much pain I was, how tight the mask, how exhausting the performance. I’d never felt safe before knowing her, and I have no explanation for this, nor do I care to find one. I’d never felt comfortable naked with any man or woman, not even myself, but I was comfortable with her. After only weeks, I found myself saying things I never told anyone before, but most of all, I was saying things to her without thinking. No calculation about how normal it would sound. Once more, I’ve begun anthropomorphising household objects; he doesn’t live there, I’d say, about a pot in a cupboard, his home is over here. Some things are he, some things are she, and it’s fine, we can make a game of it, we can laugh with each other, we can hold our oddities with the gentlest fingers, we can smooth over the roughest scars. Together, in love, we are travelling back to our most innocent selves, we are children in a way we were never able to be the first go around, and so naturally, I can speak to her as easily as to myself, or a toaster, or a car; and so naturally, here at the beginning of ourselves we have made a new child, who currently has not said a word, and who we adore beyond reason.

It would be nice to end there, satisfying even, but my son has no sense of the narrative my anxiety created over the past few months and so, equally no sense of how he wrecked it by saying Baba – father – yesterday. I call him Baba, too; most of my sentences begin and end this way because in Arab culture, we define our children relationally. To hear him say it back was to be claimed in turn, and I could see it in his eyes, the connection between sound and meaning and body. We were in raptures, I have to tell you, mirrored lights, though for different reasons¹; when I smile he smiles, and vice versa, which leads to hysterical loops where we build and build, joy to joy, laugh to laugh.

Often over the past few years I’ve heard people remark on the precariousness of the future, whether it’s a good or responsible idea to bring children into the world given what we’ve done to it, and what’s to come. These people have a privileged and poisoned view of life, one in which it was and is good, but will soon be bad. The reality is that the world has always been hideous with cruelties and gorgeous with beauties, home to apocalypse after apocalypse, war after war, to say nothing of the persistent horror of poverty, and despite it all people have continued. I grew up targeted by the conservative habit of sneering fearfully at large ethnic families, the cynical and insidious framing that says these people are only having kids to bump up their welfare payment. Even love, even the intimate union of lives, is suspicious to them. To be honest, some part of me understands the view. My broke cousin, he of the $2 screenshot (which he reuses, because he’s a smart arse) has five children and lives week to week; his brother has five, his sister has seven; my siblings have six each. All of them are working class high school drop-outs. These fathers I know, these sons of migrants who were abused and have been abusive in turn, are all in the business of back-breaking labour, twelve hour days, barely making ends meet and they all tell me the same thing: have more kids, bro.

From an outside perspective, I imagine it’s perplexing, and money might seem like a sensible motivation (if you have no idea whatsoever how much caring for a child costs, and how little you actually get on welfare, if you have no idea of the emotional and physical toll it takes). The truth is simple: these men have never been loved, never allowed themselves to know it, and it’s only through their children they experience it, cheek to cheek with divinity, mirroring joy in the eyes of another, feeling in their souls this transcendent language of life, even if they’re unable to speak it beyond saying more, we need more. I know this because I’m one of them, and after a lifetime of failing, of belittlement and harassment, of unbelonging and estrangement, it’s indescribably wonderful to be unquestionably loved, to be the cause for happiness and not for alarm, a glad shout. I’m a poet, it bears repeating, because it was language that first tried to kill me, language that was made into a live wire, deliverer of nasty shocks herding me into silence, over which I had to become a master, obsessive namer of every thought and moment, their qualities and dangers. To date I have been called and call myself many things, but none matter as much or fit so well as my son’s first word, his exquisite naming: Baba!