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Born in a Pandemic

Beloved daughter,

You were born on the eve of a pandemic. Well, not quite the eve—three days prior, to be precise.

Two months before you were born, I had heard on the radio of a new virus spreading through Wuhan, China. It was half a world away, as innocuous to me as an NPR soundbite. A few people were talking about the virus spreading to the US through Washington State and how we needed to stock up on hand sanitizer and face masks. These lone voices were a small minority and, frankly, they sounded kind of paranoid.

Well, they were right.[1] To spare you the details—and if you really want those, I’m sure you can dig up the many libraries’ worth of news coverage produced in the past few months—I will say that I don’t know anyone who has lived through anything like this before. They call it a once-in-a-century disease. Seemingly everyone on the planet has been touched by it, if not directly, then indirectly thanks to the lockdowns that have driven people stir crazy and sent the economy reeling.

For our family specifically, we have been very slightly affected compared to many, many others. As I write this, Mom and I both still have our jobs. Our health is good. We know very few people who have contracted the disease, and no one who has died from it.

In our daily routines, life is different in odd ways. Mom hasn’t been to a grocery store since before you were born. We haven’t had a friend set foot in our house in months. Your brother has developed an acute shyness toward strangers that we’re not sure to attribute to his stage of development or to the corona spooks. When we do see people, we visit in the front yard or from the safety of our door as they stand awkwardly in the driveway. We play board games and do escape rooms online. Evening walks feel like a game of live-action Pac-Man where everyone’s a ghost. And handshakes and hugs? Quaint, if not bygone customs, it would seem.

For you in particular, the main effect of the pandemic is that you’ve led the life of a hermit. By the time your brother was your age, he had been all over. He had taken photos at your uncle’s crowded Christmas light display, ushered in the new year with friends and family, accompanied me and Mom each week to an ultimate Frisbee match in a busy gymnasium, and road tripped to Colorado to see family. The only public place you’ve visited is a doctor’s office.

But what do you care? After all, your brother didn’t get much from those early experiences. Like you, he was still developing vision beyond a foot or two in front of his face. Fortunately, I suppose, your world is so small right now that being “quarantined” inside a two-bedroom home is as restrictive as a criminal being “imprisoned” in the northern hemisphere: there is still a whole lot to explore.

In the cloistered little life you’ve had so far, what seems significant about the pandemic is not what you have missed in the world, but what the world has missed in you. As people begin to re-emerge like startled turtles from their shells, they are entering a world where you are no longer a newborn, and that is a loss indeed. Virtually everyone, most of our family even, has missed out on that brand new baby magic.

I don’t mean to say you aren’t magic now. You are still way cute, probably cuter now than you were at the start. Now you are doing things like smiling and cooing and laughing—oh, your laughter! If they could bottle that stuff, they could fly rocket ships with it.

But there is something uniquely awesome—not just “neat,” I mean, but worthy of awe—about a newborn, as if the mark of the Creator’s hand is easier to spot. For how little you did in your first weeks of life, it was amazingly hard to look away from you. It was like noticing the details of a flower for the very first time. You were simply exquisite, and insanely fragile, and abounding in lines and contours and shades and expressions that we had never, ever seen. We would stare at you to try to learn your face, this little creature we had glimpsed only in dreams and ultrasounds.

Thanks to COVID, people have also missed out on holding you at your littlest. Again, you still love to be held and I still love to hold you, but it was different in the beginning. For one, your body was crazy small. Eight pounds? Are you kidding me? That’s less than my head, and I carry that thing around all the time.

You had such scarce control over those eight pounds, too. Your limbs moved unpredictably, your eyes wandered aimlessly. You were constantly slumped, a total slave to gravity. Without the steadying of our hands, your body was always making its way down to the next solid surface, like one of those Plinko discs on The Price is Right. You were the very image of helplessness.

If you weren’t crying or eating, you were sleeping, and we gobbled up our chances to have that happen when we were holding you. I swear, there is no pleasure more serene than falling asleep with a newborn dozing on your chest.[2] If virtual reality one day upgrades to Holodeck status, that is the first program I will download.

Everything about you at that age—your warbly cries, your constant fatigue, your insatiable appetite for closeness—it all expressed a sort of trust that is unique to a brand new human: unique, I think, because it was neither conferred nor earned but simply necessary. It was part of your makeup, by design, to need us. What choice did you have but to fall asleep in our arms? Whose else’s arms would you fall asleep in?

Yes, it’s true that you still don’t really have a choice in the matter, but now, larger and more “with it” and, if I’m honest, more humanlike than you were those first few weeks, your radical dependence doesn’t carry quite the same poignancy that it once did. The first hints of independence, albeit subtle, have poked through. You lift your head off the floor; you fix your gaze; you hold onto objects. Your helplessness diminishes day by day.

It’s a development, obvious and inevitable as it is, that makes me both beam and tear up. I am proud to watch you make sense of yourself and this world you’ve been born into, yet sad to say goodbye to that tiny, exquisite, needful girl.

Don’t get me wrong—the pride is nearly continual, the sadness but occasional. Watching you grow is little loss and mostly gain.

There are moments, though, when I wish I could just stop the train, when I wish I could take a photo and jump into the frame to live there forever. But then you would never become the girl, the woman, that you were made to be, and the world would always be stuck in a pandemic, plagued, among many other ailments, by the inability to meet my darling daughter.

It’s not an exchange I’d ever be willing to make. The world has already missed out on too much.

[1] Mostly right. At first, it was reported that the virus entered through Washington, but it was later discovered that, like a thief in the night, it had entered through California some time earlier without detection. This is one among millions of little facts that have been reported ad nauseum, minutia that normally would go unnoticed by the majority of the public but, in this period of heightened anxiety and endless time at home, have been wolfed down like fistfuls of popcorn.

[2] PSA: When you grow up, don’t ever fall asleep like that with your own baby (or anyone else’s, for that matter) unless there is another adult in the room. When Mom or I napped with you, the other one always stayed awake, lest you slid off our chest or our twentyfold weight rolled over on top of you.

Frustrating the Father

Beloved daughter,

Your ability to frustrate me is amazing. It is remarkable in two directions: though you are so small, you can unbalance me so greatly. How could someone who weighs 12 pounds, someone who must be carried anywhere she wishes to go, someone who cannot speak or wield tools or consume solid food bring a grown man to the edge of his self-control?

While I am sure each baby has their own unique ways of frustrating mom or dad, in your case, nothing boils my water like your refusal to eat from a bottle. With your brother, we had no problem introducing him to a bottle; the dude liked to eat, no matter the source. This led me to believe, naively, that every baby must be that way; I didn’t know that rejecting the bottle was even a thing that babies would think to do.

You have been kind enough to shatter my illusion.

If you struggled against the bottle for a few minutes each time, if you fussed and whined and made a scene before eventually giving in and saying, “Well, I don’t like this thing but hey, I gotta eat,” I could handle it. But you don’t just fight it; you straight up reject it. You become a little Gandhi fasting in protest against the terrible injustice of the bottle. You just won’t take it.

Mom and I have adjusted the independent variables. We have tried different rooms, times, positions, temperatures. We have amassed various bottles and inserts and nipples. I have sung, shushed, rhymed, and rapped. I have tried it with Mom nearby and with her afar. I have tried it with a fox, I have tried it in a box. (Well, not literally that last one, but you get the idea.)

Despite our best efforts, no matter the gymnastics we perform to convince you to eat the one and only food you ever eat and the one and only food you need to survive, when that bottle touches your tongue, you react one of two ways:

If you’re calm, you act as if you’ve never heard of a nipple. The milk pools in your mouth and then comes trickling out like you were just bit by a rare snake that’s caused your swallowing muscles to undergo paralysis.

Or, if you’re not calm—and we always get there eventually—you act as if the bottle itself is the snake, venom dripping from its fangs. You spit it out like a curse, your eyes tightening into a hot cry as you realize that your own father has tried to assassinate you.

If the hill you had chosen to die on was something inessential, like refusing a certain toy or swaddle or swing, I wouldn’t mind. I would probably try a few times, then give up. No big deal. But the hill you’ve chosen to die is one on which you could actually die: namely, starvation.

What really upends me about the whole thing is the obvious necessity of what you’re refusing. Mom works hard to extract this precious, nearly magical elixir from her body; we store it in carefully marked containers like it’s enriched plutonium; we set the conditions to laboratory precision; and then plah, you spew it out (or, just as insulting, let it dribble down your neck and soak into your shirt).

The one plus from your bottle aversion, other than extra cuddle time with Mom, is that it has prompted some spiritual reflection in me. As your brother can attest based on the letters I’ve written him, when I reflect on these fatherly things I can’t help but think of Fatherly things, too. And when I ponder just how terribly vexed I am by your irrational refusal of the very milk of life, I can only imagine what continual state of frustration our heavenly Father must experience as He watches us spit, spew, and dribble His blessings all over ourselves.

Just as a small example, one of Paul’s famous lines comes to mind: “For the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6.23). For most of my life I have thought of this verse as a great admonition: I took it as a mortal warning, a memorably worded description of just how seriously we need to take sin.

And that may be what it is. Perhaps, though, it is also simply a reminder of a plain truth, something we should already know, similar to when I cradle you in my arms and whisper, “Okay, baby girl, this is good stuff, I promise. You need it to live.” I shouldn’t have to say it, yet apparently I do; and even so, I cannot force you to see the truth of it.

I think of God giving us the same message—the same painfully obvious truth, whispered a thousand different times in a thousand different conditions:

I shouldn’t have to say this, but if you eat that one deadly fruit I told you about, you won’t be well.

I shouldn’t have to say this, but if you use others, you will end up feeling used.

I shouldn’t have to say this, but if you live for yourself, you will end up hellishly alone.

I shouldn’t have to say this, but if you go this journey without me, it will be unbearably long and unbearably heavy.

Thanks to you, my anti-bottle rebel, I can imagine, in the tiniest way, His frustration when His children hear these messages and respond to the Bread of Life with a cavalier “no thanks.”

You know what the funny thing is, though? You don’t always say no.

On two occasions, for whatever reason,[1] you gave in and had a little meal with me. While on the one hand that adds a maddening layer to the whole situation, as if you are playing some sick, backwards version of baby Russian roulette, it also injects a bit of hope. If you’ve eaten once, I know you can do it again, contrary to the dribbling and spewing and wailing.

And on that point I can relate to the Father in another tiny way. If, like Him, I had no recourse, no backup option (i.e. Mom) when you reject the bottle, I would do anything in my power to get you fed. I would buy every bottle, watch every YouTube video, consult every specialist, attempt every position. I would get a dropper and squeeze it into your mouth one droplet at a time. I would swallow it myself and regurgitate it to you if that is what it took.

And you know what I wouldn’t do? I would never, ever, ever, ever say, “Well, I guess my daughter isn’t eating, then. So much for that. Starvation it is.” A father does not just let his child starve, even if by some madness she would choose to.

I suppose that is why the poet calls God the hound of heaven: He will not, perhaps cannot, stop chasing us. And I suppose it is why Paul, shortly after the “wages of sin” passage, tells the Romans just how dogged our Father is:

“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8.38-39).

Is it possible that in the final analysis, none of us will be able to withstand the persistence of the Father, that we will, despite our squirming and fussing, ultimately be no match for His patient hand, that we will finally give in and eat?

I’m not sure. But I do know He will never stop trying.

[1] I recall your brother being somewhere else each time, but hey, I can’t exactly get rid of him every time you need to eat.

A Poem for You

Beloved daughter,

This is the first time I have written you one of these letters. For the past couple years, I have used this online platform as a way to reflect on my relationship with your brother, and all the miracles and mysteries and fantastic moments of fatherhood.

Soon I will be retracing with you many of the same milestones that I experienced with your brother. And I must confess, little one, that until you emerge into the world and we start getting to know you a bit better, it’s been challenging for me to think outside that box of “retracing.”

I have no doubt, though, that when they come to pass, each of these moments will feel totally original with you. Mom’s pregnancy certainly has felt original. When we found out we were pregnant the first time, we had the sudden excitement of becoming parents. We had new skins to grow into as mother and father.

When we found out about you, by contrast, our essential identity as parents didn’t change, but the makeup of our family did. We also had another set of eyes through which to view you: your brother’s. He has come with us to nearly every doctor’s appointment and ultrasound, and naturally it has been my job, while the nurses and midwives tend to Mom, to watch him and make sure he doesn’t destroy any medical equipment. (He hasn’t—though he has discovered every button and screw on the examination bed, and he tried to hack into the doctor’s computer more than once.)

So when we’ve heard your heartbeat or seen your little face in the ultrasound monitor, it usually hasn’t been “Oh my goodness, there’s our daughter.” It’s more often been, “Look, Gabriel, there’s your sister.”

As fun and fascinating as it is to see this whole process through the eyes of a young toddler, recently I have been trying to make more space for cherishing you, just you, through my own eyes as your father. I suppose it has been my first exercise in playing parent to two, in managing that finite resource of fatherly attention. I have started to sit longer with those moments of “Look, there’s my daughter.”

To my surprise, one product of this intentional focus is a poem that I wrote for you. It was almost an accident. When I first sat down to write this letter, a sentence spilled out of my head onto the page, and I knew right away that it was the sort of line fit for a poem, not a letter. Do you know the last time I wrote a full poem? Neither do I—it’s been that long. And a rhyming poem? It may have been when I proposed to your mother. (I’ll tell you that story another day.)

If you end up an English major like your parents, you may one day study the poetic form that I am playing with here: the villanelle, which uses just two rhymes and recycles the same couplet at certain reprises throughout the stanzas. I have not remained true to the exact villanelle structure, but the form itself isn’t really the point. The point is to reflect on you, as an expectant parent, as your father, and as the father to your brother.

Here is my first-ever poem to my first-ever daughter.

Conceiving of You

Let us dwell on you, my child, my daughter,
as you drift and loll in the up-less deep,
hearing faint laughter muffled by water.

It was your brother who made me a father
and so a father I will always be—
though never, till now, to you, my daughter.

In brother’s eyes, is anything odder
than watching baby in the ultrasound screen,
a shaky white sketch etched in black water?

How could he know what outstanding honor
awaits him when finally he gets to meet
sister—the name he has for you, my daughter?

And for me, what blessing just to wonder
what wonder it will be to hold your body,
light as laughter and welcome as water.

I know you not yet. All I can offer
are these musings about a word so sweet—
sister for him, but for me, daughter,
who looks like laughter and sounds like water.