i see you with ioanna and i am filled with a kind of sadness. i wish you were my father from the very beginning. i wish you had held me in the hospital when i was born and i wish it was you that brushed my first set of tears out of my crying eyes. i wish that it was you who had a hard time changing my diapers and it was you who laughed when i ran around the house naked. that taught me how to ride a bicycle. how to kick a ball. how to use a hammer. how to fix things. i wished that i was young again and it was you from the very start. i wish it was you from the very start and you could have fixed me before i became broken. i see you with our daughter and there’s a little smile on my face as i think “how lucky she is to know her grandfather from the very beginning.”
Category Archives: words
father’s day, 2007
with another one on the way, i look at ioanna, our first daughter and measure up the father i have been so far. i think i got most of it right and there are areas in which i can improve. i can give her more of her type of time, i.e. dolls and the like. i could take her out to the museum more often as well. make it a point of teaching her things, like numbers and the alphabet.
i look at her and measure up myself and for the most part, as much as i want to find myself lacking, as i often do with so many other things, i am proud to be her father. i am happy. i could be more, but i’m happy with how she’s turning out, which i n turn means we’re doing alright as parents, i’m doing alright as a father. not bad for someone like me.
she gave me a card today, approached me slowly as if she balancing a bowl of soup in her hands. and handed it to me barely, her fingers still at the edge of it. ‘lemme show you’ she says and takes it gently back and puts a finger between the folds of the envelop and tears it open in little rips. she was delighted in opening it, revealing the big reveal, that the card was a bear cub exploding her arms to give her daddy a bear hug. squeals from ioanna. pure delight.
i hugged her tightly and smelt her hair. i could do better, but i’m not doing so bad either.
beer and nuts
just because the beer is in the cooler, it doesn’t mean the nuts aren’t salty.
at some point you have to
start again, get right into it, start this conversation because, frankly it’s too lonely otherwise.
as tiring as this is, as it can be, full of boredom and the mundane.
the big news is mz is pregnant again. we’re 5 months int it now, a boy, and although the maternal serum test and the AFP came back negative, the doctors saw something in the baby’s heart. an echogenic foci in the lefdt ventricle. and while by itself it is not enough cause to warrant an amniocentisis (a 1 in 1500 chance at this point of there being a genetic abnormality), we’re doing it anyway for the piece of mind.
and i’s too much even writing this, as if, as if, as if. as if any of it doesn’t get lost in the translation. as if by recording the course of events i can somehow change them. as if it mattered. on and on.
she’s more beautiful than ever my wife is. in a short span of 3 years our daughter has gone from blind crying baby, to pouring imaginary coffee and toasting our cups with a resonding “cheers!”
and all of it matters because of the living of it and the writing cannot bear any of it.
it never, ever goes away
it rears, on hind legs, rabid and soft. it insists, like some kind of new pain. i don’t know what i am doing as a father, as a husband. in frustration the little one bit me, and i smacked her, quick. but despite that, every time i wake up into the living room she says “daddy” the way some people say happy birthday. how could my father abandon a child like this? i watch my wife’s belly, stare at it like it was going to tell me something. waiting for it to tell me that it’s going to happen again, we are going to suffer again. a month is a long time and even then, even then. i don’t think i fight with her over nonsense, i feel something vital is happening there, something is coming loose. then again, as if my anger can hold it back together. as if we were dealing with fissures as opposed to tears. a new kind of broken, every time.
an aversion to rest
a sinking of the teeth, i dont wanna hear this, i’ve never heard
you say it, not so loud, not like this and i feel as if the clouds
are conspiring against me, and the leaves have turned the sharpest just
before winter and if there was a way around it, i expect you to find it
to put the curves into it and the corners to rest, have the cement edges
weathered down by tongues and hold my hand through it all,
i’ve been done long enough to have it all come to this, to stray pebbles
caught beneath the heel, sand and dirt in my hair to coughing
and i dont wanna hear the tremor of your voice or the wind pushing
against the door or empty branches
only the sound of a palm caressing the cheek before leaving
of putting my eyes to rest
there’s a magic place in me
and she’s got little feet just so
and she mutters to herself lost lullabies when she’s tired
and leans against me with laughter, slides across my back
and she makes up words for what i am and who i can be
and during the quiet times, she whispers instructions to her little friends
and puts them here and there, telling them their stories
and i believe in her, i believe in this place
and i believe in the magic of life
i believe in the magic of my child
c’mon c’mon
anger and spittle, the chance of everything, of nights split open like pomegranates, of lightning fast and so easily slow, of streets yawning the horizon just before daybreak, of drink upon drink, of steering wheels and jumped corners.
and you were the friend in the need, in such demand and you made me feel cool, like we owned the night with each drink. and we broke things, we broke open ourselves and we laughed, heckled every demon back into it’s corner. we were princes and we were to be feared and loved and reviled and envied.
how i miss drinking with you, losing myself, losing the hours to the night. how i miss the possibility that this is all that was.
sweet little one, you’ve turned three on me
birthday girl today you’ve rounded a corner where suddenly everything is different and while on the surface of things it all appears the same, some intangible mark has been crossed and you are all things suddenly to me. suddenly bigger, suddenly clearer, suddenly smarter, suddenly kinder.
at one point i saw you get into the toy car your grandfather bought you next to your cousin and you both looked at each other and without saying a word, something passed between you and you each nodded and smiled and looked ahead through an imaginary window.
everyday, suddenly, everything is different now.
are you sure what side of the glass you are on?
the looking glass, the seeing glass, i no longer see you, some distant memory of a thought of a fragment of a voice through a muffled wall in the dark just before sleep.
i remember the staircase, bounding down it, two at a time, i could not wait to get out. i belonged out there man, in the streets, in the day, the night, anywhere like some stray animal that did not want to find a home. roaming, hunting, looking for play, looking for more room to move around.
and when i remember it’s as if it’s through the eyes of someone else, i’ve possessed some body, neither boy nor man, something ageless or imagined, or perhaps a bit of both, all of both. an imagined past that still lives within me. oh, how squandered that little bit of freedom. how truly beautiful.