We’re just a little delayed due to bocce and
emotions not felt before pregnancy and
moving all of our furniture into the garage and
painting all of our walls and
the cable guy.
I’ll write the last letters tomorrow.
And I’ll put them in a poster.
And a book.
Just for the baby.
XOXO.
I’ve dreaded the “X” entry for the last 27 days.
Baby, I apologize, there’s just not a lot of inspiring X words.
When we were little kids, your auntie used to leave dinner early to go to the bathroom. From the bathroom, she’d sing the song Xanadu sung by Olivia Newton John from the movie Xanadu.
We’d all giggle from the table hearing her five year old voice warble, “Xaaaaanaaaduuuuuuu….”
That’s all I have for you.
The x-axis is horizontal.
The y-axis is vertical.
I sometimes have a hard time remembering that, but now you don’t have to.
Your Papa’s favorite hobby, after making music and playing bocce, is playing xBox.
(He’s pretty good at it too.)
I’ve been taking lots of Omega 3 acids so that your hand and eye coordination is primed. At least that’s what the research about fetal development says this year.
(Who knows what it’ll say by the time you read this?)
I just wanted to tell you that it would tickle your Papa if you played xBox with him. It would probably irritate the heck out of him if you beat him at his favorite games. I’ll leave that decision up to you.
Grin.
Some people like to express feelings they’re uncomfortable saying in person through a letter.
I’ve heard roommates do this with nasty notes.
Relatives do this with letters detailing how they’ve been wronged.
Exes like to do it in the name of “closure.”
My advice?
If you feel wronged, write it all down in a letter to that person and throw it away.
You’ve now articulated your position so you can
work through it on your own or
resolve the issue in person.
Expressing your feelings in a letter isn’t fair to the recipient.
They have no recourse.
They can’t explain themselves.
Letters aren’t fair.
If you need to express an unpleasant feeling on paper, do it, rip it up and speak to the offender in person.
We’ll all be healthier for it.
Oh! If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life! What a glorious sentiment!
Still, I love what I do more than most folks, and it’s still work.
There are still trash cans to be emptied, dishwashers to be filled, phone calls to be made.
And it’s all work.
I’d rather eat a meal with my family and friends.
I’d rather watch Lost or South Park.
I’d rather canoe down a river.
Don’t get suckered into believing that if you just loved what you did enough, it wouldn’t come with discomfort.
That’s a useless regret.
You will always need to choose between activities.
Some will bring you joy, some will bring you irritation.
This is life.
Baby, I hope you have more joy than irritation.
I hope you love your work.
I was in the grocery store last week. It was a long line. Behind me was a television personality with her young son. He was playing the “Why?” game.
After this, we’re going to make dinner.
Why?
Because your dad, you and I need to eat.
Why?
Because it’s 4:30 in the evening and that’s when we start dinner.
Why?
Because of the earth’s rotation on its axis and the location of the sun…etc.
Now when my friends with two young kids get suckered into the “Why?” game they turn it into a critical thinking exercise.
“Why do you think?”
Why do you think indeed.
Baby, I remember this one job I had.
Employees vented all the time.
They’d come into an office,
shut the door and
rant about the stupidity of their coworkers.
They’d rant about the procedure.
They’d rant about the idiots around them.
And then they’d leave.
Leave me utterly winded.
It was addictive too,
before I knew it,
I was venting to my coworkers,
overreacting to emails,
blowing imagined slights out of proportion and
venting
behind closed office doors.
What I needed at that job, what they needed at that job, was someone secure enough to say, “What are you going to do about it?”
They needed someone to stop the endless roundabout venting.
It’s tempting to vent all the time, about every real and imagined slight.
But before you vent to an unsuspecting friend or coworker, take a moment to consider the effect.
Will you just rile up your listener?
Venting is only good for the venter.
When we were little, your auntie and I were often told “Patience is a virtue.”
(We repeated it as Patience is a Gertrude, but we got the gist.)
It’s just so hard as little kids, waiting for stuff to happen just seems indeterminable.
The wait goes on forever.
And then, all of a sudden, you’re a grownup.
Years become months.
Weeks become minutes.
Time starts flying by, so fast you fear that you’ll never fit it all in — really, is it four-thirty already?
What happened to the glorious anguish that preceded Christmas?
What happened to the indeterminable wait in the car for everyone to pile in to head to Country Kitchen?
I once heard an interesting theory about this perception of time.
When you’re five, a year is a fifth of your life.
At 32, a year is merely one thirty second of your life.
The pie slices become mere slivers.
And time seems to whiz past so very fast.
Baby, I hope to help you squeeze all the joy you can out of these big pie slices I get to share with you.
I’m so lucky to be with you during the big ones.
It’s so tempting to treat life as something that happens to you.
It’s so rewarding to feel that live is unfair.
Baby, you will be so annoyed with me for refusing to let you play the victim.
My mom did the same for me.
When I said “I can’t do this…”
She would say, “You just haven’t developed the skills…”
And gosh darn if she wasn’t right.
Yes, there will be times in your life when you are hurt, when someone maliciously takes something from you, when you are attacked.
And I will be there to hug you and share in your pain.
But when it comes down to it, you’re responsible for the decisions you make in your life.
You and you alone can control what happens to you.
I’ve seen it with some relatives, I’ve seen it with friends.
I’ve felt the temptation to be the victim myself.
It’s an easy way to get attention, to feel special.
This is not to say that victimization isn’t real.
There are horrible people doing horrible things to folks that don’t have the resources to defend themselves.
Baby, I hope we can help those people
But if you say that due to some external force,
some unfairness in the universe,
if you say that you can’t,
I’ll reply with,
“You just haven’t developed the skills yet.”
And I’ll be right.
Baby, growing up in the Midwest, I feel like I miss out on some of the joy that Californians take in beauty for beauty’s sake.
I can’t just have a footrest, it also has to hold books and open beer.
I feel that way about plants.
We’ve had a recent run of warm weather and everyone in town’s talks about seeds, tomato types, soil preparation and compost. I went to a big hardware store the other day and tried to find some plants I was comfortable growing, herbs, peppers, beans, squash.
They were very hard to find.
Here on the West Coast, it seems folks are into growing the most beautiful flowers, big shrubs of green and ground cover. The purpose of these plants confuses me. Landscaping? Enhancing the beauty of one’s yard?
I guess it’s the same with lawns.
(My secret dream town would have the only lawn on public space, where it would be reserved for barefoot kickball games and freeze tag. In my dream town, front yards are vegetable gardens. Back yards, chicken coops. Side yards, for composting and hide and seek.
But I’m liberal like that.)
So baby, I’m telling you, when Mother’s day comes around and you’re rooting for a plant to send me.
I’m quite happy with the useful ones.
I prefer lavender to roses, chamomile to lilies, and basil to hostas.
You are unique.
There is a chance, however,
there is roughly a one in a million chance that someone will test that they have the same DNA as you.
(But that’s just CSI stuff.)
However, German folklore says there’s a chance you have a Doppelgänger.
Doppelgänger is a German word, meaning any double or an exact look-alike of a person. Lots of fiction has been written about one’s “evil twin”. As I kid, I read a lot of doppelganger fiction and it scared me to pieces. (Is there such a thing as doppelganger fiction? Terrifying.)
Literally, Doppelgänger means doublewalker, a person who is acts exactly the same as someone else.
Doppelgängers are mostly considered bad luck bringers.
I was terrified of finding my Doppelgänger.
Always scanning the crowds, certain that my double was there, ready to take over my life and bring me bad luck,
I never found her.
Being scared of her was a waste of my time.
(And I could have spent that time developing some dichotomies.)
It was only folklore, the stuff of stories.
You are unique.
You come with traits and interests and love in a way that no one in the world has before.
You are you.
People are everywhere.
We breed and make more people.
Those people have people.
And before you know it, we have crowds and masses and groups.
And although those people are all unique, with their own traits and interests and love, there are also many of them.
You are only one of all of these people.
Part of our job as parents is to prepare you to get along with these people.
How to learn the rules of these people.
How to be one of these people.
Some of these rules won’t make any sense to you.
(Why can’t we take our pants off when we’re hot? I don’t know, really.)
Some of these rules are essential.
(We don’t hit when we’re angry. We don’t pass gas at the dinner table. We greet other humans with a smile and open heart.)
You are also ubiquitous.
Baby, I will do everything I can to help you play well with others.
