Nikolai Alexander wasn’t sure if he wanted to become a father. In fact, when he was in high school, he wondered all the reasons why he shouldn’t have children, even though in the back of his mind he wanted to have his own family.
When Alexander got a message from his wife Tiffany while at work in 2019 saying, “I’m pregnant,” he felt a mixture of excitement and anxiety about becoming a father.
“I got the message while I was at work and I was like, ‘What?!’ I was surprised and happy at the same time. I was thinking, ‘I don’t know how to raise a child, I have no idea, it seems so hard, I have a child myself’. On top of that, we had been trying for a while and it wasn’t working, so I said, ‘Okay, let’s not have kids then.’ Shortly after we gave up, she told me she had taken a test because she had missed her period,” Alexander recalled.
He describes the journey from the moment he found out his wife was pregnant with their son, Zayn, to now, more than four years later, as a “roller coaster of emotions” that alternates between, “Oh my god, this is the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” to, “Oh my god, this is the hardest thing that’s ever happened to me.” But there’s nothing Alexander would want to change about his situation.
He told Observer Online that when his son was born in 2020, he was most surprised by the pressure of becoming a father.
“The day the baby was born, the doctors put Tiff through a lot of hardship because they said they were going to do a C-section and they didn’t, they tried everything, getting Tiff to push and nothing was happening. They spent hours trying to push the baby out but Tiff couldn’t take it and she was in pain. It was a really, really long day, lots of crying, making sure Tiff was OK, it was really difficult,” Alexander said.
“But when I saw the pictures[after he was born]something shifted in my mind. I thought, ‘Wow, this is my son.’ I don’t know what it was, but I think seeing him rewired my brain chemistry. The weight of it all hit me. When I held him for the first time, I had to take off my shirt in the hospital room and place his tiny body against my chest because we encourage skin-to-skin contact here.
“I was always scared to hold little babies because I was scared I’d drop them. But holding him so close to me had all these emotions and thoughts swirling in my head: ‘Don’t drop him, I have to make sure he’s not dropped, am I holding him properly, how beautiful he is, how scary’. Then and now, there are so many thoughts swirling, so many things going on at once, and not all of it is good,” Alexander recalled.
The 35-year-old admitted that while becoming a father can be a wonderful experience, there were also difficult aspects and moments when he felt like he couldn’t cope, but he said he tends to push through those thoughts rather than dwell on them.
That drive to see things through the toughest times comes from Alexander’s own relationship with his father, who, while close, wasn’t as close as Alexander would have liked because of a change in his home life when he was about seven years old.
“He was there. He wasn’t the absent father that a lot of Jamaicans have to deal with. I still have a good relationship with him but he never taught me how to ride a bike or drive a car or any of the other manly things, for example. I never learned those things through him. I had to learn by trial and error. He never lent himself to sentimental things or things that would be major learning moments,” Alexander explained.
“Later, a close friend of mine, who is also a doctor, told me that one of the reasons I struggled to finish things I started back then was because I didn’t have a father figure who would push me to do difficult things. With Zayn now, I’ve never had that problem of, ‘I can’t do this,’ because when he was born, I was determined that I had to do it because I couldn’t make him do what I had to do without my father’s full support,” he vowed.
When asked how much his son resembles him, Alexander explained that Zayn is the perfect mix of his mother and father, describing his son as a “total nerd” who is gifted, passionate about information and education.
“He’s the perfect combination of me and his mom. And by perfect, I mean he’s a total nerd, but at the same time, he’s way smarter than I was when he was his age. He does his times tables and reads and writes at a first-grade, maybe second-grade, level. He can spell multi-syllabic words, he’s memorized his times tables to numbers that my brain can’t fathom, and he can count in multiples of 10, 12, 15, 17.
“But the memory is something he inherited from his mother and the love of knowledge is something he inherited from both of us. But it’s not just my good qualities that I see in him. There are good qualities, but there’s also a stubbornness and selfishness that’s obvious and I’m like, ‘Hey, you don’t need to take that away from me yet’. He’s very stubborn and he has his own bad qualities,” Alexander said with a smile.
In addition to the unique traits Zayn inherited from his parents, Alexander wants to give his son an environment where he can see his father as a best friend, role model and safe space.
“I don’t just want to tell him things and make sure he does what he’s supposed to do and be the authority figure, but I want to be someone he can trust — like I talked about, girlfriends, condoms, and ‘Daddy, I almost got a girl pregnant’ and ‘Daddy, I don’t know what I want to do in life.’ I want to be a best friend and a role model. So in my personal life, I’m trying to do things like writing and building a career that I’m proud of, that he can follow as an example and say, ‘My dad did this, he worked hard and he was successful.’ I want him to know how to navigate life because I’ve paved the way for him,” Alexander said.
