POSITIVE Parenting

"Yes, yes, yes," says Marlon Sutherlandas he plays with his baby's hand. The child smiles at him and makes some bubbly baby sounds. Little does young Sutherland know that his life was saved by his father, the man who now towers above him like a lighthouse on a stormy night guiding a ship to shore.

Though the breeze is heavy and the noisy vehicles whisk by, the two seem to be in a world by themselves. Gaze fixed, they smile at each other, both occasionally bursting into sound.

The baby's mother was threatening to abort him when he was just a few weeks old. However, Sutherland would not have it.

"She ask mi fi contribute to it and mi say no, my money only a go buy Pampers (diapers) and feeding," he says, adding that his girlfriend wanted approximately $20,000.

Making threats

But it was not an easy task to persuade his girlfriend to carry the child to full term so he threatened to throw her out of the house.

"She never have any other choice so she either haffi work wid wha me say or go back to where she did deh," he tells The Gleaner.

Sutherland says when the mother was about five months into the pregnancy, she still wanted to get rid of the baby. His voice is filled with anger as he speaks. "If we have an argument, she will say something like 'mi nuh know why God won't kill it" (the foetus). He thinks the reason the mother did not do the abortion at that time is because it would have affected her health.

This is the first child for Sutherland who is in his mid-twenties and claims that from he was 18 years old he wanted to have a son. This was a major factor in him wanting his girlfriend to have the baby. "A di first one fi mi and we come to an agreement say me wi keep the baby if we break up," he says.

However, the child's mother is not going anywhere. She, too, has grown to love her son, now four months old, and she does not want to give him up.

Role model

Sutherland is happy that he is finally able to be a father, and he is looking forward to being a positive parent - a role model to his son.

"Mi feel good about having a son," he says.

Because of this, he ensures that he purchases everything that the baby needs. He smiles as he tells The Gleaner the most fulfilling thing about being a dad.

"It better to have a child that is yours than to have somebody else pickney around you, because you feel more comfortable."

But that statement is a contradiction since he cares for two other children as well, which his girlfriend has from previous relationships.

He says he cannot clean his baby but he fills in otherwise. "Mi feed him an wipe him nose an dem ting deh, but when him get bigger mi wi start bathe him," he says, proudly.