Baby Daddy

We call pictures of Signe when she was younger 'baby Signe', so it only stands to reason that an old picture of myself from when I was a baby is 'baby daddy.' The picture is novel, but it's also candid in a way that I don't think of many old pictures of myself being - maybe that's just because I don't remember ever seeing it before. After all, familiarity with a thing (like seeing an old picture often) overwrites our feelings about it more rapidly.

I'm such a sentimentalist - at least, I can be. I am continuously on watch for the 'me' that is always in the process of un-becoming - the person I was, that drifts away into the past. It's undetectable in the day-to-day, but in a stray memory that gets unearthed, I occasionally catch a glimpse of who I was five or ten or twenty years ago, but no longer am. Much of this is the person I left behind through experience and hopefully becoming wiser. Yet thoughts of my own past naiveté rarely embarrass me - more often, they make me wistful.

But that picture of myself as a baby seems to have triggered something else entirely. It hurts to look at that picture - into my own eyes, almost forty years ago - and have no connection, no matter how tenuous, to my personality or mental state then. It is 100% disconnected from my life today. And though not unique, necessarily, this picture is the first one that has caused me to dwell on this reality.

Nobody has any but a buried, arcane link to their own early childhood, yet I find it sad to be separated from it so completely, and permanently. It is a reminder that this shadow will only creep further over my life - through my childhood, and adulthood - as I grow older. My memory's fidelity for any age in my life will only decrease with time.

While I was feeling bad about this today, I started to think of Signe, and what I can do to make her life great. How can I ensure that the love I feel for her results in happiness, even meaning, that she will find in her own life? That's when it occurred to me that the experience of giving love as an adult is not the same as the experience of receiving it as a child. As an adult or a child, our feelings are products of our life experiences, but a child has a fraction of the experiences from which to form conceptions. When I became a father, I didn't understand that Signe had to be *taught* love. But even now, when we hug, she doesn't feel the love I'm feeling. My love is the memory of my own life experiences. She's feeling a love that she is only now learning. But in a way, the gesture is how we cross that gulf, which makes it more special.

I wonder what my parents think of when they see the picture of baby daddy. They've always been sentimental (it's likely where I got it from), and they've had more - and different - life experiences than I have. I think of my mom emotionally gushing over any of a large number of pictures like that one, and how my reactions to her sentimentality have evolved over time, from puzzlement, to embarrassment, to a quiet understanding that her feelings are hers and worthwhile. When she gets old enough to think of such things, I hope Signe understands my feelings, but I shouldn't expect that to happen quickly, and maybe not ever. I hope she doesn't think less of me for having grown sentimental over that picture of myself, so many years ago, nor our pictures of baby Signe, which by then will be growing decades old and beginning to feel lost to a past that neither of us can exactly still conceive of.