Life affirming

 
My skills as a photographer is modest. Yet my conceit is such that I buy a complex, expensive piece of precision digital optics and shoot it in auto setting. I think it's kind of like buying a vintage Ferrari and retrofitting a slushbox. So the resulting pictures are pedestrian at best, and if my camera could sigh with dull disappointment, well, too bad. I shot this picture at the Georgia Aquarium last weekend. By some happy accident or a deeply latent pool of unexpected talent, I ended up with a shot that I love. Hyperbole being the disease of overly sentimental parents, I think it's the bestest picture ever of the two of my favorite people in the world, and it is, as the topic stated, life affirming.

Domestication of daddy

I have somehow become the designated bath person for Annabelle. At around 8, sometime after dinner, Annabelle starts to wail plaintively, "Bath, bath!!!" I pretend I don't hear her and hope that my wife would somehow gamely tackle the task. Then Annabelle comes to me, grasps my hand tightly in hers, and pulls. And I go, because I do not have the heart to disengage her tiny hand from mine. In fact, I cannot. It seems altogether all too intimate a link to sever, more so because she initiated it. For the moment, I am a big ox, being pulled by a small peasant girl. To the field or slaughter, it does not matter.

At the same time I live in muted dread of the time, either due to some mischief and misdeeds or by mere passage of time and culmination of familiarity, I can drop her hand without a thought. Be callous and unthinking of her. Will it happen? I see her universe growing each day and by extension, my part becoming smaller. Before I can drop her hand, perhaps she will stop coming to me, face scrunched in mock distress, wailing, "Bath, bath!!!"

I understand on the intellectual level the profitlessness of this train of thought. I think back on my relationship with my parents and the one between them and their parents. Regrets and vague yearnings, contrasting with sharpness of conflicts, and raw, bleeding edges of wounds.

I will be better. I will be. Yet the pledge has the practiced ring of promise spoken often before and never quite fulfilled. But I will be better.

Addition

We are adding a member to our family. In July. A little boy. It came as a shock. Not that we weren't trying. We planned for quite a while to have two kids. Since our first one is a girl, we really wanted a boy this time. And people were never short of advice on how to achieve that end. One of the more scientific-sounding advice had some voodoo involving ovulation timing so we got a few ovulation sticks and proceeded to get ready to rock on short notice.

Except the sticks always indicated that my wife was not ovulating.

At the same time, my wife was suffering from some kind of chest cold and she went to see her doctor. And as a precaution, they ran a quick pregnancy test before a chest x-ray. One guess what the result was. I guess when you're pregnant, you don't ovulate. Makes sense, I guess. Otherwise, you might queue up a litter of siblings...

I feel some trepidation, of course. Over these past two years, if you add up the hours of sleep I've lost, I'm pretty sure the sum handily exceeds two years. However impossible that actually is, that's exactly how I feel. It's as though you go through a lengthy, still on-going, rigorous and exhausting test of endurance, patience, fiscal discipline, and aforementioned sleep deprivation, and you decide to sign up for another, concurrent, more of the same. Oh the fecundity...

But we are ready. I expect everything will have a bit of comforting deja vu-ness to it. And we won't stress about certain things nearly as much as we did the first time around. I'm not naive, or blindly hopeful. I know it'll be difficult, perhaps in new and different ways than the first time around. But the big difference is now I know. I know. I know what the reward is. Every time my daughter runs to me, smiling, calling out "daddy!" in an excited way a child reserves for her father in these early, early years when her universe is small and you are the sun and the stars, I feel the weight of the world shedding from my shoulder and my universe, for that moment, shrinks to the same size as hers. And she is my sun, my stars.

That, I can stand to have hundred times over, no matter the cost.

Hope

Hope is not a necessarily a good word. You can hope, in a passive manner, for many things. And in that, it's even more passive than "wish" and in some ways, probably less likely to be achieved. Yet, it is powerful. It can enable us to withstand assaults against our dignity and body. It can make us stronger than without, but why?

I am still not sure but I think I am beginning to understand. Last week, America elected her first black President. I am told that he represents Hope for all people, not just blacks. And I look over at my daughter who does not care at this moment who the President is, or what his race is. But all the same, I look to her and wonder... Will she be the President of the United States some day? I admit, it is not impossible. I can hope, if I would hope for such a thankless job for my daughter.

I would not even have thought of it before last November 4th. Without even thinking about it, I had excluded it from things my daughter, a natural born American citizen of two naturalized Asians, could one day be.

Hope represents possibilities. It unlocks doors that you had not known were existed. And even if you do not eventually walk through them, the fact that you can, if you wish, if you want, if you try, is liberating. It gives such vibrancy and color to the word I had previously considered ambivalent. I hope now. More for my daughter than for myself, and I love that I can.

A whole year!

It's been an entire year since I last blogged.

Hmm, let me spit that word out one more time. Blog... Blog... Blog...

I never did liked the word. I know it's short for "web log" and I guess it is clever in some pedestrian, opening-child-proof-bottle-on-first-try way. But I guess I never could understand how it became a phenomenon. I've been ranting on the internet for years, ever since I discovered it in college in 1989. But we always sent away out posts, in my case, to the ugly depth of alt.* hierarchy. It was in a way a tempest in a teacup. A raging argument for the eyes of a few who bothered to follow alt.binaries.pattern.argyle.pictures.discussion. And for all the passion and dedication, none of it mattered.

But blogs... Provided that you blog about a topic of interest to some people, they come to you, and your site is propagated through search engines and aggregators. It's a more efficient process, leading directly to popularity and way. too. many. mediocre. blogs. Such as this one.

Anyway, on to my kid.

Annabelle turned one this past May and she is growing like a weed. My wife can hardly hide her glee at the rate of her growth, as she is 5' 2" and she wished for a tall child. I remind her that it's way too early to tell and Annabelle could hit a brick wall (that is somehow suspended horizontally) any moment now.

But it's interesting how you wish for your kids some things that you did not have. For my wife, it's height. Not that 5' 2" is Oompa Loompa (those illegal immigrants who are slaving away for less than minimum wage for the fat cat industrialist Wonka) but it was apparently something she wanted.

For me, I'm not sure. We didn't grow up rich, but we weren't poor. We were loved, but also had stern discipline. I wasn't really popular but I had good diverse (if not always intersecting) group of friends. I'm not sure if I had an ideal childhood, but it certainly wasn't bad. I guess it was... mediocre?

So what do you wish for your kid that is different from what you had if what you had was... fine. Sure, I want my daughter to have a great childhood, want for nothing and enjoying every day, but if the drive for that "better" life is driven by the delta between what you had and what the "better" life is, then maybe it's a rather weak propulsion. But the alternative does not bear a thought.

Ah well. I wander.

Sugar and spice and...

Everything nice, are the things that girls are made of. Allegedly.

Heaven must have run out of sugar and pretty much everything else nice, and had only east Asia's most pungent spices left over when my baby girl's gastrointestinal system was made.

No other explanation is possible for the concentrated evil that Annabelle expels every couple of days or so.

Sleep

Dear Sleep,

I miss you. You were easy, maybe not for everyone, but for me, you were easy like a slightly dumpy, insecure teenage girl with daddy issues. You laid down so easily, eagerly for me for as long as I could remember. But now you visit but seldom and never for long, for you know I have another mistress, one who tolerates no rival.

One day you will return to me, but never for as long, as completely as before. Even as I lie wrapped in your clutching embrace, my mind will wander, from time to time, to my other love. Now, and forward. As she grows, starts to crawl, learns to walk and run. As she skins her knees, swoons for her first crush, as she drives for the first time. As she leaves for college, meets her love, and herself begins a family.

It won't ever be the same again.