Nikolai Alexander was not sure he wanted to be a father. In fact, while in high school, he came up with all the reasons not to have children, though another side of him knew he wanted to have a family of his own.

So in 2019 when he received that “I’m pregnant” message from his wife Tifany while he was at work, Alexander experienced a mix of excitement and fear over being a dad.

“I was at work and I got a message and I was like ‘What!?’ I was both freaked out and happy at the same time. In that I was thinking ‘I don’t have any idea of how to raise a kid, I don’t know how to do any of this, this is going to be really hard, I am a kid myself’ and then on top of that we had been trying to have a kid for a while and it wasn’t working so we said ‘okay cool, look like no children nah forward then” and right after we gave up she said she did a test because she missed a period,” Alexander recalled.

He has described the moment he learned of his wife’s pregnancy with his son Zayn until now, more than four years later, as a “rollercoaster of simultaneous emotions” that flips between “Oh my God this is the best thing ever” and “oh my God this is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life”. But for Alexander, there is nothing he would change about his situation.

He told Observer Online that the weight of becoming a dad surprised him the most when his son was born in 2020.

“The day he was born they put Tif through the ringer because they said that they would have done a C-section and they didn’t so they had her trying to push and the whole works and nothing was happening. It was a long multi-hour process of trying to push him out and she couldn’t manage and she was in pain so that day was just really, really long; a lot of crying and checking if she is alright, it was a lot,” Alexander said.

“But when [he came out and] I saw the picture of him, something in my heart changed, like I thought ‘wow that’s my son’. I don’t know, I think seeing him re-wired my brain chemistry. The weight of it hit me. I mean when I held him for the first time, because in the hospital here they advise you to do skin-to-skin contact, so I had to take off my shirt in the hospital room and put his little body on my chest.

“I have always been afraid of holding tiny babies because I am afraid that I am going to drop them but holding him that close, my brain, I was feeling all the emotions and thoughts of ‘don’t drop him, make sure say him good, are you holding him properly, Oh my God this is so beautiful, Oh my God this is so scary’. It was and still is a whirlwind of thoughts where so many things are happening at the same time, not all of them good,” Alexander recounted.

The 35-year-old admitted that while fatherhood can be a wonderful experience, there are aspects that he has found difficult and moments when he thought he could not handle them. He said, however, that he never allows those thoughts to linger and tends to push through.

The desire to push through the most difficult times come from Alexander’s own relationship with his father. While they share a close relationship, it is not as close as Alexander wanted it to be as his home life changed when he was around seven-years-old.

“He was there, he was not the absentee dad that a lot of Jamaicans have to deal with. I still have a good relationship with him today but, for example, he didn’t teach me how to ride a bike or drive a car or any of the manly things, I never learnt any of those through him. I had to learn through trial and error and figure it out, he wasn’t there for any of the sentimental things or any of the things that would have been pivotal learning moments,” Alexander explained.

“Then a good friend of mine, who is also a doctor, said to me that a part of the reason that I struggled at the time with finishing tasks that I started is because I never had a father figure who would have pushed me to do the things that were hard. With Zayn now, I never lingered on a moment of ‘I can’t do this’, simply because I had made up my mind when he was born that I had to do it because there was no way that I was going to have him have to deal with what I had to because I didn’t have the full force of my dad behind me,” he vowed.

When asked how much of himself he sees in his son, Alexander explained that Zayn is the perfect mix of his mom and dad. He describes his son as gifted and a “full nerd” who has a zeal for information and education.

“He is a perfect combination of me and his mom. When I say perfect, I mean he is a full nerd, but he is also smarter than I was at his age by far. He is doing times table and reading at a grade one, maybe even a grade two level, he can spell multi-syllable words, he memorised the times table up to some numbers that don’t even make sense to my brain, and he can count in multiples of 10, 12, 15, 17, stuff like that.

“But the memorisation part he gets from his mom, the love for knowledge he gets from both of us. But it’s not only the good things about me that I see in him. The good things are there but the stubbornness, and the self-centeredness are evident and I am like ‘brooo you never need fi take that from me still’; he is so stubborn, him own way bad,” Alexander said smiling.

In addition to the unique traits that Zayn received from his parents, Alexander wants to give his son an environment where he sees his father as a confidant, a role model and a safe space.

“More than just teaching him stuff and making sure that he does what he’s supposed to and being an authority figure, I want to be somebody he knows he can trust; somebody, like the things I spoke about, girlfriends and condoms and ‘daddy me nearly get a girl pregnant’ or ‘daddy I don’t know what I want to do with my life’. I want to be a confidant, and a role model. So I am trying to do some stuff in my personal life like writing and setting up a career for myself that I can be proud of, that he can model and say ‘my dad did this, and he put in the work and he saw success’. I want him to know how to navigate life because I set a path for him,” Alexander stated.