I chatted briefly the other day at school pickup with the mother of one of Ava’s classmates. Turns out she had a friend who reads this blog (or maybe the other one). The mother had been describing Leah to her friend when she mentioned Ava’s name, and the acquaintance suddenly realized exactly who was being discussed. It’s a small world.
As we talked, we eventually came to a common lament about how neither of us really knew anything about how our parents’ lives were changed by our arrival in the world. It’s a fact I’ve occasionally considered but haven’t really obsessed on. I mean, short of having your parent write an autobiography or keep a journal, what means have there been for chronicling such an event? Life happens pretty much the same way for everyone, save only the most arcane bits of personal reflection. Most folks probably don’t put much stock in those reflections if they care about them at all, but they seem to me like the detail of a gilded, bejeweled clutch held by a grandmother in an old photograph; Where did it come from? Where is it now? Was it beloved? Why?
After we left school and were on the way home with Ava, I considered what events in Ava’s life might make her curious about her parents’ lives and the time they spent raising her. To be sure, there’s lots in our life that doesn’t get printed here, believe it or not, but even those details aren’t so fantastic that one could rightly call them singular in the experiences of many families. There’s catharsis for me in writing these words for Ava that she may never read, but I’ve always envisioned this blog being for her. Maybe not as a gift. Maybe only as a record, a touchstone to help her find her own way through the same decisions she’ll surely face. Or maybe simply to know something about us.
Now that Ava’s big brother usually requires feeding about the time she’s going down for the night, I get to lie with her and tell her new stories about Terry the Worm before she (and often I) drift off. Last night, after she fell asleep and before I left her room, I raised myself on my elbow next to her in bed and stared at the nearly imperceptible rising and falling of her stomach in the cold dim light sneaking around the edges of her shades. It’s funny and wonderful at once, like watching a tiny sparrow take flight with an impossibly long and stringy tangle of grass for its nest, that Ava has no sense of or care for how much she’s changed my life. And not because she came and insisted on being fed and changed and cared for and read to and played with and sunscreened and barretted and piggy backed. These things don’t really change who you are, because they’re really things you always had it in you to do, just not the excuse to do them.
The change is in your capacity to love, which feels to me nearly as profound and unexpected as the sudden appearance upon waking one morning of a new appendage. It’s this capacity that’s responsible for these moments in which I catch myself not recognizing myself or my actions, like some reverse phantom pain of a new amputee. How did I get here? Why is this little girl doing this to me? I walk away from quiet moments alone with Ava having grown. Both in my capacity to love and the depth of my love for my daughter. Deep and wide. And someday she’ll know it all, if she chooses. I wonder what she’ll make of it all….
