The Day I Became a Father

It was a harrowing 36-hour period. Shortly after midnight May 24, 1972, a young girl was abducted during a hold-up at a Waco 7-Eleven store, and as a reporter for the local newspaper, I was called in to cover the story. After the girl was released on the afternoon of May 25, my photographer and I conducted our interview, and copy and photos were turned in near deadline.

After an exhausting day and a half, I got home at about 11:00 p.m. on the 25th. It was a Thursday night, and I had planned to take off on Friday and spend a long Memorial Day weekend catching up on much-needed sleep and relaxation. But before I had settled in for the night, my wife informed me that she believed she was in labor with our first child. Instead of going to bed, we packed up and headed for the hospital.

I had seen enough movies and had watched enough "I Love Lucy" episodes to know that babies are born within two hours after the expectant mother gets to the hospital. So I naturally believed that I only was delaying my bedtime by a few hours, at most.

Movies and television programs do not necessarily reflect life as it often is.

After 19 hours of labor, at exactly 8:00 p.m. on May 26, 1972, Dena Gayle Weaver came into the world, and I became a father.

In those days, fathers were not permitted in the delivery room, so I paced in a traditional waiting room for expectant fathers smoking cigarettes (it was the fashionable thing to do at the time, and hospitals had no problem permitting smoking inside their facilities) and watching people come, have their babies, and leave, wondering all along why it could not have worked that way for me.

When the nurse finally rolled the incubator containing my baby into the waiting room, I was amazed at this creature with its eyes wide open, staring calmly up at a disheveled young man with a silly grin on his weary face.

From that moment, my life was forever changed.

I knew very early that Dena was special. When she was only 5 years old, she already was reading music, playing the piano and composing simple melodies. At that time, I surmised that she would become a famous composer and musician. But I was naive, and I believed that Dena's musical accomplishments at such an early age were due to talent, alone. What I later learned was that Dena has the ability to commit all of her effort and focus to whatever task she undertakes.

She graduated with honors from high school. She then attended Baylor University, graduating in four years with a degree in psychology. Although she wasn't sure what profession she wanted to enter at the time, circumstances brought her into contact with the business world when she accepted a position with a bank. During her time at the bank, she earned a Master's Degree in Business Administration and became a trust officer, handling millions of dollars entrusted to the care of the bank.

When the bank closed its Texas trust operations, she enrolled at Baylor Law School, and after three years, she graduated second in a Baylor law school class comprised of the brightest and best law students in the state.

She is now a third-year securities litigator with a large, multi-national law firm, and she currently is spending her birthday in Houston working on a major case involving billions of dollars and impacting thousands of people worldwide.

To say that I am proud of her is an understatement.

So happy birthday to Dena Weaver, one of the great successes of my life.

R. David Weaver