Dear TJ,
I want to tell you about the time I heard you existed. It was on a Saturday morning at about 7am. I had been up too late on that Friday night. I don’t know if I had a gig or if I was just out with some friends. But I probably drank too much and was in a deep sleep. Your mother came running in, turned on the light in the bedroom, and waved the pregnancy test in my face. “I’m pregnant!” she yelled. She had never seemed more alive.
I thought that I did pretty well. Handling that…. Yes, we had been trying to get pregnant. Yes, I was ready to be a father. But… Wow…. I didn’t that that it would actually work! Or that it would happen that fast. So there I was at the crack of dawn on a Saturday morning with a touch of a hangover clouding my head. I got up and went into the bathroom. I closed the door. I turned on the light. I looked at my face in the mirror for a long time.
Your mother left me alone. I was in there for about 10 minutes. I was just trying to get caught up, you know? I came out and we hugged. We talked about it for a couple more minutes. Will it be a boy? A girl? Healthy? We assured ourselves that we were ready. Then we really didn’t talk about it for the rest of the day. It just didn’t seem real. But you never left my mind.
In the months before you came. I wrote you a very long letter. I’ll give it to you someday. I wrote that well over two years ago now and here you are getting bigger everyday. Life is changing and we are changing with it. So I feel the need to keep writing to you. Why? I have thought long and hard about that question. I suppose the most honest answer is a selfish one. I really want you to know me. To know who I am today. I’m sure I’ll be a different man when you get older. No better, no worse. Just different. As I said, life changes and we change with it. I often wonder what my father was like when I was a small child. I have the pictures of us playing in the backyard, and I have the memories of him singing James Taylor songs as I fell asleep. And we have a spectacular relationship today. But I wonder who he really was 32 years ago. What were his dreams? What were his fears? What did he love about being the father of a two-year-old little boy? What frustrated him about being the father of a two-year-old little boy? I asked him once what his reaction was when he found out he was going to be a father and he gave me the expected answers; he was “excited”, he was “ready”, etc.. It is possible that time glosses over some of the more subtle emotions that we have and that is all he remembers. Or then again, maybe that is really all there is and my writing this down is but a futile attempt to find something more in it all. As if the basic fact that you are here is not enough.
So I am going to keep writing to you. I hope you don’t mind. And I hope someday you’ll find the time to go through all of this and get to know me a little better as I am today. And by doing so, maybe you’ll be able to get a more intimate glimpse of who you were as well. And I hope the picture I can paint with these words will be more vivid and colorful than all of the thousands of digital photos and videos we will have undoubtedly accumulated by then. And I hope that the force with which I love you today will be as clear as anything you’ve seen.
Why am I posting this on the Internet? I have thought long and hard about this as well and don’t really have a good answer to that. Does anyone really care about any of this? I don’t know. Is it even any of their business? Probably not. The questions I have and the concerns I weigh about putting my life on the Internet go on and on. I have a facebook account but don’t really use it. I still don’t fully understand Twitter. I was at a bar with a friend the other night and “checked us in” there. I later found out that it meant that he notified about 900 people exactly where I was at that time. That terrified me. I am not really up to date on the real power of the internet. But I am going to go ahead and post these letters to you every Monday. I suppose we will see where this is headed. I hope people read them. I hope other fathers read them. But, again, most of all, my son, I hope you read them. See you next week.
Love,
Daddy.
3/01/2017
The Daddy Letters June 22, 2011
Dear TJ,
I want to tell you about the time I heard you existed. It was on a Saturday morning at about 7am. I had been up too late on that Friday night. I don’t know if I had a gig or if I was just out with some friends. But I probably drank too much and was in a deep sleep. Your mother came running in, turned on the light in the bedroom, and waved the pregnancy test in my face. “I’m pregnant!” she yelled. She had never seemed more alive.
I thought that I did pretty well. Handling that…. Yes, we had been trying to get pregnant. Yes, I was ready to be a father. But… Wow…. I didn’t that that it would actually work! Or that it would happen that fast. So there I was at the crack of dawn on a Saturday morning with a touch of a hangover clouding my head. I got up and went into the bathroom. I closed the door. I turned on the light. I looked at my face in the mirror for a long time.
Your mother left me alone. I was in there for about 10 minutes. I was just trying to get caught up, you know? I came out and we hugged. We talked about it for a couple more minutes. Will it be a boy? A girl? Healthy? We assured ourselves that we were ready. Then we really didn’t talk about it for the rest of the day. It just didn’t seem real. But you never left my mind.
In the months before you came. I wrote you a very long letter. I’ll give it to you someday. I wrote that well over two years ago now and here you are getting bigger everyday. Life is changing and we are changing with it. So I feel the need to keep writing to you. Why? I have thought long and hard about that question. I suppose the most honest answer is a selfish one. I really want you to know me. To know who I am today. I’m sure I’ll be a different man when you get older. No better, no worse. Just different. As I said, life changes and we change with it. I often wonder what my father was like when I was a small child. I have the pictures of us playing in the backyard, and I have the memories of him singing James Taylor songs as I fell asleep. And we have a spectacular relationship today. But I wonder who he really was 32 years ago. What were his dreams? What were his fears? What did he love about being the father of a two-year-old little boy? What frustrated him about being the father of a two-year-old little boy? I asked him once what his reaction was when he found out he was going to be a father and he gave me the expected answers; he was “excited”, he was “ready”, etc.. It is possible that time glosses over some of the more subtle emotions that we have and that is all he remembers. Or then again, maybe that is really all there is and my writing this down is but a futile attempt to find something more in it all. As if the basic fact that you are here is not enough.
So I am going to keep writing to you. I hope you don’t mind. And I hope someday you’ll find the time to go through all of this and get to know me a little better as I am today. And by doing so, maybe you’ll be able to get a more intimate glimpse of who you were as well. And I hope the picture I can paint with these words will be more vivid and colorful than all of the thousands of digital photos and videos we will have undoubtedly accumulated by then. And I hope that the force with which I love you today will be as clear as anything you’ve seen.
Why am I posting this on the Internet? I have thought long and hard about this as well and don’t really have a good answer to that. Does anyone really care about any of this? I don’t know. Is it even any of their business? Probably not. The questions I have and the concerns I weigh about putting my life on the Internet go on and on. I have a facebook account but don’t really use it. I still don’t fully understand Twitter. I was at a bar with a friend the other night and “checked us in” there. I later found out that it meant that he notified about 900 people exactly where I was at that time. That terrified me. I am not really up to date on the real power of the internet. But I am going to go ahead and post these letters to you every Monday. I suppose we will see where this is headed. I hope people read them. I hope other fathers read them. But, again, most of all, my son, I hope you read them. See you next week.
Love,
Daddy.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment