Two things first:
1. If you’ve ever ventured over to the About page (if you haven’t, you should), you know that I started this site to appreciate the “moments of joy and frustration, confidence and uncertainty, and pride and disappointment”. And there have certainly been moments encompassing all those emotions during the last 17 months.
2. I don’t read books very often. I read a couple before Isabel was born, and read a bunch for school over the past three years, but I rarely read books for pleasure. I’m more of a magazines and internet kind of guy. I read the newspaper almost everyday on the train, and have two magazines that I subscribe to and won’t let Mrs. FWL get rid of – GQ and Fast Company. Yes, I know I can get most of the same articles online, but there is something about the glossy pages and tangibility of the actual magazine that I enjoy.
With both of those things said, about 10 months ago I defied #2 and actually found the time to read a book for pleasure amidst all the craziness (true story!) and it perfectly embodied #1.
Edited by Brian Gresko, When I First Held You
I’ve learned many things along this winding road, but one thing for certain is that while specifics change, all parents share a common thread of experiences. The same is true with these stories – while I couldn’t relate to many of them specifically, nuggets from several spoke to me. Nuggets that were often simply a sentence or a quote that I can easily relate to a personal experience.
Lev Grossman, from Brooklyn, New York, writes about the first time he held his daughter:
“Up to that moment in my life, I’d had very little contact with children, at least not since I’d been one. I had no younger siblings. I’d never even babysat. [Lily] was the most beautiful alien creature I’d ever seen, but still: a visitor from a foreign planet. A planet of which I was now, suddenly, an inhabitant.”
This was me exactly. Only child – check. Never babysat – check. Daughter looked like an alien (don’t most babies?) – check. Holding her in the minutes after she was born, and in the early weeks after, simultaneously felt weird, scary, and awesome. My big hands practically enveloped her tiny head, making sure it didn’t flop around, and I could support her entire body on my forearm. We had to learn her foreign language of cries and whimpers, and teach her ours of love and devotion. We were now living in her world.
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A baby smile triggers the feels for many reasons, but mainly because (a) they only have a few teeth and (b) it’s pure. As adults, we regulate our emotions based on the situation, but when babies smile, you know they are happy. When they cry, you know they are…actually, they could “be” anything, so just start guessing. But one thing is true, as Bob Smith says:
“Smiling children are night-lights that keep adults from being afraid of the full spectrum of darks, which come in a range of paint colors from Blackhead to Closed Coffin.”
Honestly, I have no clue what my kid is laughing about sometimes, since she is able to make herself laugh for no apparent reason, but it’s contagious. She can instantly captivate a room full of adults, just by smiling, laughing, and screaming. And if she truly understood the power she had, we’d all be screwed. (Refer back to us being in her world.)
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Alexi Zentner’s anecdote about his daughter in her crib before dawn, was one of these moments that I couldn’t really relate to when I read this months ago. But now? Totally different story:
“Each time she yells ‘waffles,’ she says the word differently, as if she is making a meal out of the letters. She tries the word in for fit: waffles; wa-full-s; waffles; wafflewafflewaffles; waffles.”
A toddler learning to talk is fascinating. Right now, Isabel consistently says four words without any prompting – agua, guah-guah (“woof-woof” in Spanish, so her word for dog), cat, and baby (which is also incredibly vain because she’s usually referring to herself), and can identify several other objects if you ask her. She obviously can’t actually ask for anything, so she just blurts out words and points, commanding her minion parents to meet her needs (remember, her world). She goes around the house yelling “a-gua, aaaa-gua, aaaaaaaa-gua” (whether she’s thirsty or just wants to play in the bath) with pride and conviction, and the word begins to take on a life of it’s own. Soon, there is a chorus of “agua” as we start a call-and-response, and our hearts melt from the utter cuteness of it all.
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The cliches are true; kids grow too f*cking fast. When I First Held You
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