For Signe - To Stay Young

Signe, you are almost five months old, and each day you are doing new things and becoming more aware of what is around you. I've already mourned so many times what of your babyhood has come and gone, as I watch you play or feel your size as I pick you up. I hold you against my chest and we look into the mirror, and the face whose eyes catch sight of me is not so tiny as it once was, and is more full of awareness, smiles more readily and carries more expression. I try to remember those moments when you smile at me because they are perfect - you are simple and your reactions are perfect in their simplicity. Nothing else I accomplish in my day is so pure as to see you smile at me.

I am scared for my dad, Signe - I know that your grandfather will pass away before I'm prepared, because I will never be prepared. It is the same with your grandmother - and yet there is something more with my father, because he is a man and I am supposed to be a man, and even now, at my age, when I am uncertain how to be strong, I find myself thinking of him and wondering what he would do, and when I am sad I think of him and I wish for him to know that I am suffering, and to tell me that everything will be okay. He has, my whole life, been sensitive and unafraid of his feelings as no other man I've known, yet he seems brave for it, and unafraid, the very antithesis of the doubt and fear that so often consume me, for the mortality of myself and everyone I love.

Signe, the other night I dreamt you grown, with a baby girl of your own that you brought to us, your parents, her grandparents. I had so many times tried and failed to imagine what your face would look like grown, and in my dream I saw you clearly, and your face was yours, yet different. Your same innocence was in your eyes and your smile. If you have a child, it is likely that he or she will never know their great-grandparents, but if they come to a world that I am still in, I will speak about them, because they gave me all the best characteristics of myself. It is the same as how I see my grandmother in my father, and in myself - and though my memories of her fade, my sense that she is a part of me only grows stronger with time. I'll tell your child about my grandmother, too, because with time she becomes mythical to me, transforming from a person that I knew into a facet of the world that is eternal. She has become all of nature to me, the sanctity we owe the natural world and the awe that we feel for it.

Life is so short, and passes so fast, and we are too soon old and too late wise. Each moment matters - I'll try to remind myself of that often, to become a better father and a better friend. Time will judge me in that effort - time, and your happiness. I wish you that happiness - of loved ones who humbly learn how to care for you, and raise you to be self-possessed, self-aware, and compassionate. I am so excited to be part of your life, and I wish for nothing to come between us, to keep us from teaching each other and sharing all the joys of being alive.

For Merry - To Assume Nothing

Merry, do you ever ask yourself how you got here - how unlikely it was, many years ago, that the characteristics of this one future - who you married, where you live, what our life is like - would come to be? The day that I met you at Lake Zorinsky, could you have guessed what we would one day have, could you have foreseen our life together, or our daughter?

How do you think of us, Merry? Are we a rock with a few cracks that we need to keep at work sealing, or are we two birds in a storm, flailing with all our might against the wind, that we not be separated? Maybe I am a fatalist, but for the mistakes I judge one or the other of us to make on any given day, when things are not perfect between us, I see only myself to blame in the grand scheme of things, and believe that only I have the opportunity to deliver us a better future, because you have proven yourself to understand, already, what we need. And before you can contest this, can we examine the evidence?

I didn't want to date you, because you didn't strike me as someone I would date; you were too easy to talk to, to good a friend, too kind and too genuine. You were Susie Derkins and I was Calvin. You were patient and found a way to convince me, and even then it didn't click for me until I realized just how many days you made me happy; how could I not want to be with you? I fell in love with your kindness, your patient affection, and your smile.

I didn't want a pet to take care of; I told you that if you got a cat, it would be yours, and not ours - what more insensitive thing could I have said? And yet you found Rocky, and acted quickly, and then welcomed me to be part of his life. And only once he had settled in as an equal part of our family was I spinelessly ready to call him "ours," right when I ceased to deserve to.

I didn't want to have a child; I endlessly hedged myself by saying that I thought I would want one "some day, just not yet." At least when you told me you were ready I had the sense to listen, and from understanding the episodes above, to trust that you might know better than me. You gave birth to Signe, and I have discovered one day at a time that I needed her to help me be whole, to give me a chance to be a better person, the same way you gave me that opportunity.

I may never know why you chose me for any of this. I'll never understand what you thought I could give you. You've admitted to being in some bad - or at least complicated - relationships before ours. Perhaps you are just bad at picking partners, of which I am one, and perhaps I was simply lucky enough to recognize and hold on to a good thing. You would probably dispute this claim, but I ask, are you so sure it is not the case? Are the virtues you see in me real, and if they are at least that, then are they at all rare?

I've thought a lot about the legacy of each of the decisions above, and what it will mean for us many years from now. Nothing is written in stone, yet certain implications of each seem clear. I will try my best - which has, by my own judgment, often been quite poor - to be a good partner and father. It is all I can do. It probably won't be smooth, but it will be a genuine attempt, I promise. I'll give you, Rocky, and Signe the best life I can, but you must know how little conception I have of what that means, or how to do it. Age seems to fill me not with wisdom, but with doubt - to make me more certain each day of how much I don't know, of how little I can control.

But I know I love you, and Rocky, and Signe. I know that somehow, we've made it here, and for that I am grateful. Of all the alternative lives I can imagine for myself, there is none that compares to this one. Though I can't understand what sort of luck it took to get here, I promise never to think that luck will bless our future - it will be our own decisions that will bend our lives towards meaning and joy. To remember so is all I can give you. I love you and the life you've made us, and I'll try to give us a future worthy of it.