One year of being a dad
“Daughters will ruin you,” my friend Bob said. “In the best way.”
My daughter turns 1 this weekend.
I’ve been a dad for a year and mostly what I can say is I’m getting less and more sentimental.
Less because I wish I had some sweet lessons here, like “I want to see the world with wide-eyed wonder like my daughter does,” but I don’t. I’m tired. If my eyes are open wide, they can’t be shut for a nap.
But I’m more sentimental in that I have the gall to tell you love exists. It’s not a warm, fuzzy feeling (though it can cause this). It’s not a metaphysical force (though in the proper hands, it can be). Love is a biological reality. I mean that I can’t not love my daughter. Who she is to me is written into my being. It’s as basic to my function as my metabolism.
Maybe that’s what it means when John calls God “love.” We can become love, too.
And that hurts. C.S. Lewis said “Love anything and your heart will be wrung, possibly broken.” 1
As close as she is to me, how much of my emotions she has power over, and how much the blood pumping through my aortas belongs to her, I have very little control over what happens to her.
I was walking with her in a stroller the other day, and I was anxious about how much sun was hitting her legs because a doctor friend told me that the risk of melanoma is more closely related to our sun exposure when we are young.
“Am I going to hide her in a room? Never expose her to the sun? Baptize her in a vat of Coppertone anytime we leave the house?”
Of course not. She’s going to feel the sun on her skin. She’s going to see tragic things that will change her. She’s going to get her heart broken.
It’s a threshold I’ve come to over and over again as a parent: I can never say I’m entirely or even remotely in control of what happens to her. She will face dangers, trouble, grief, pain, and I am powerless to stop it.
And then I think: that’s my pain, my trouble, my grief.
“Daughters will ruin you,” my friend Bob said. “In the best way.”
I can’t watch videos of dad’s dancing with their daughters at weddings. It was hard enough for me to move her from our room to her crib. I can’t protect her into who she will become. I can only hold her hands as long as she needs me to, pick her up as many times as she wants me to, let her fall asleep on my chest until she won’t fit anymore.
Would I spare my daughter that pain as well? To understand what it is to love her own children severly like this someday knowing she’s raising them to release them?
No, I hope she knows it. And I pray she understands me more when she feels it, knows what I feel for her every second of her life, because I’ve seen them all from the day a year ago when she showed up. I don’t think I would take those first cries of hers away from her. They told the world her lungs work. They were her first words in her own voice.
I hug my mom and dad a little tighter these days. I’ve never seen a bigger grin on my grandmother’s face than when she holds my girl. My favorite sound is the slap of her hands as she crawls on our hardwood floors to come find me. The greatest feeling in life is her falling asleep on my chest.
And no, I’m not just being sentimental: I’m being love.
Today’s painting was by the impressionist Berthe Morisot, of her daughter, Julie Manet. Yes, of those Manets as in Édouard Manet. Berthe was married to Eduoard’s Brother Eugène.
Lewis, C. S. The Four Loves. HarperOne, 2017.
I am not well. I might as well keep sobbing. You captured your love for her so beautifully here. I go down a hole of thinking of the hardships my kids will encounter one day, and how it's all out of my control and that a lot of it is necessary. My son is 5 now and he is pure magic. That imagination of his, it's incredible. I can remember small snippets of my own, but the images are foggy. I don't know when it was that I..lost..some of it
You know the path that you face as a father, Sam. Recently, I walked my daughter down the aisle, gave a toast, and danced with her. It was wonderful, and filled with tears. I’m ruined and I couldn’t be happier.