datu.
you weren’t here the last time i wrote anything from my heart. you were a swelling, a burgeoning, a not-quite, even though technically all of you already existed – two eyes, ten fingers, a heart, a soul – just on the other side of your mother’s bellyflesh, across the border between anticipation and relief.
but today is your one-hundredth day of life, and i’m compelled to either try to find the words, or risk losing them forever.
this silence itself has been a journey. the first few days since you were born, i was simply speechless. jaw too dropped to talk, hand too jittery to write, mind too sleepless to think coherently. all i could do was hold you. a tiny you, a three-weeks-earlier-than-expected you, a color-of-a-peach you, a you with skin the texture of a whisper. i stared out that hospital room window for three days, at the gallery of other hospital windows staring back, shielding your eyes from the florescent lights and your ears from the incessant chirps of the machines plugged into your tired mother. “is this how life begins?” i asked, after the third failed attempt to get the nurses to make the room less frigid.
the afternoon we brought you home, you finally opened your eyes to the natural light, and my speechlessness became awe. maybe a too-strong-of-a-word would be unworthiness, but except, yeah. how dare i have the audacity to think i, that anyone, could retrofit this sacred experience into language? why knowingly mistranslate? what greater irresponsibility as a writer? besides, what good parent actually has the time to reach for a pen between changing your diaper and bouncing you until your wails subside? am i here to live a full life or to spend most of my days documenting what remains? my first lesson of fatherhood: treat you like a person, not like a writing prompt.
as a new parent, it is tempting ignore the calls into the unknown, and instead reach for the familiar. it is tempting to forego the duties of raising a child, and instead nurse a body of work. but you are not a muse, you are my son.
over the course of these months, i’ve refused to write for the reasons that typically inspire me to – to publish, to promote, to prove to myself. raising you has been a lesson in appreciating the process over the product, something i’ve yet to appreciate as a writer. it was only last week that it dawned on me how.
parenthood is often mistaken as a job in stewarding another person’s becoming. i feel like i’m the one who’s actually finally growing up.