Does it ever go away? That passing feeling that the incredible little person standing in front of you couldn’t possibly have arisen out of your life? I get it a lot with Ava, and it’s not even so much upon hearing some particularly bright or funny thing she’s said. Mostly it’s just seeing her. The concomitant sensation is one of being set adrift, alone, as in, “Well, here she is. Now what?” It seems there are so many more ways to screw this up than to do well by my kids, I think because I always assume what I’m doing is going to damage them in some way. Too much tickling? Should we have listened to that Duran Duran song? I never should’ve corrected her spelling of “serious.”
Soon, Ava’s going to be able to read these posts without any help from her parents. If she can find them. She’s already dictating comments to me that I’m to include on Flickr photos she likes. She’ll be typing those herself before long, too. Sometimes I think if I never do anything else as a parent, I’ll have met my own very low standards of achievement if I can convince Ava that she’s amazing and perfect just because she is here, because she is.
