You are me reborn into a different man and blooming into love and connection and into life. You are squirt guns, cake, laughter, naps, and story time.
—
To my daughter on the eve of her arrival:
I love you, even though I’ve never met you. There is nothing more in this world I want more than you as the flowering of my family. I am so elated you’re coming.
And I’m f*cking terrified.
This thing that is coming along in your wake, this fatherhood is going to chew me up and spit me out into a shape I can’t recognize from here; the month or two before your birth. You are on the other side of a gulf, but so am I, holding your hand and looking back at the me that is now. But for now, I am an edifice of self, staring down the wrecking ball, about to be broken for unknown ends.
Poop is going to become a much bigger part of my life; a much bigger part than I ever thought it would ever be.
I’ve read all my books. I’ve asked for counsel and advice from men and women I respect. I have no idea what I’m doing.
I will quip that the 4th trimester sleep deprivation you will force upon your mother and I more or less follows exactly the script for the induction of Stockholm syndrome. And I will laugh at my own joke, and cry a little.
Dormant programming will come online, ways in which I will become my parents, genetic knee jerks, instincts and fears I thought I’d already moved past will bloom. I will be unseated and remade every damn day for the rest of my life thanks to you. Never before will I have been challenged in all the ways I fail as a man, never before will I have had to stare down all the money I’m not making, all the patience I haven’t developed, all the ways I won’t be able to save you from pain discomfort and hardship, all of my weaknesses and compromises and flaws of characters which I risk bequething to you.
The slightest sniffling in you will feel like a wrenching, abject failure on my part.
We will hate one another at times. We will hate one another for the ways we don’t understand each other. We will hate each other for all the ways we are the same, and do understand one another.
There will be ghosts in your face, in your speech, in your movements; ghosts of your mother and me, ghosts of relatives we’ve known, ghosts of ancestors I’ve never even met. And there will be the things that are utterly, irrevocably you.
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There will be ghosts in your face, in your speech, in your movements; ghosts of your mother and me, ghosts of relatives we’ve known, ghosts of ancestors I’ve never even met. And there will be the things that are utterly, irrevocably you. You will be holy, a being of awe, even when your covered in piss and screaming like someone is murdering you as I try to clean you.
My love for you will crack me open, will dash me against the stones. And what grows from that will be a different man. Better perhaps, but inevitably a man whose face is—for now at least—indistinct.
I will lose eases and simplicities in my life I was not even aware I was enjoying.
You are chaos at its cruelest, at its most innocent, at its most loving. Because you are the end of a world, you are a world just beginning.
You will hurt me like nothing ever has, like nothing else ever could; hurt me worse than I’ve ever hurt myself even at my most masochisticly guilt ridden. There is no better conduit for putting fear in me than you. Nothing will ever be the same because of you.
You are the death of me.
You are me reborn into a different man and blooming into love and connection and into life. You are squirt guns, cake, laughter, naps, and story time.
I let go of the man I was, the man I am. I open myself to you heart and head cracker. I open myself to the man I am to become.
See you soon daughter.
Love, your father.
John
The End
—
Photo: marissaperry / flickr
Beautiful …. but you aint seen nuthin yet. Waite until she’s born. You’re dreams become a reality and it’s GREAT!