Dear Z.,
I've been meaning to read to you more often. You are developing at such a rate that I can imagine looking back years from now and thinking lots of these kinds of thoughts: I wanted to do more with you, spend more quality time together, explore new places with you. One of my biggest fears around this fatherhood stage of life is that one day I'll wake up and look around and ask, how did I get here? A deeper fear in there is that you may spend months or years of your precious life wishing that I was more present with you, more engaged, that I expressed my deep love for you more often.
All of that is my own fear, wounding, and projection. Stuff from my life that still wants to be healed. Stuff that I'm trying to not pass on to you. "Good luck with that," my friends say when I tell them that I feel responsible for healing all of the wounding and trauma in my DNA, that you may fly into this life free and clear of all of it.
It is important to take responsibility for our own experiences, feelings, wounding, and projection. Especially as we impact others. This letter is not meant to be an advice column, but if there's anything you take away from it, let that be it. My fear is not for you to hold, or carry. I got me, son. And I got you.
It will be years before you're able to understand any of this, which is a trip to me, here in October 2022, at 36 years old, with you as a 9-month-old baby and your mama sleeping in the other room. If you ever read this, all of the time and experiences between this moment and that moment will be everything in your living memory, and only part of mine. I could write a poem about that, and may, someday. For now, I think it's just fun to think about.
Back to the beginning: reading more. I've done so little reading to you since you were born, and what little I have has been mostly in Spanish. It is meant as a gift. I am fluent only in English, and though my pronunciation en Español is good, my vocabulary is rudimentary. I always wanted to be fluent in more than English. Somewhere I read that introducing different languages to babies under ten months gave their brains the opportunity to wire in certain parts of pronunciation and understanding in ways that can never be made up for.
I want you to know that I don't need you to be interested in Spanish, or in reading, or anything else. I want to know what you're curious about, what lights up that bright heart of yours. Right now, some of the things that seem to light you up: being held upside down, engaging with just about anyone, and your mama.
Seeing you two together is like watching a supernova dance in outer space, all the rainbow colors swirling around your hiccup giggles and her delight. When you're really happy, your eyes curve into crescent moons, like those of Japanese anime characters. Nothing else in the world matters to me in those moments.
So I will read to you more, and see what comes of it. The parenting books say that establishing a bedtime routine is vital as you grow; other sources say that reading to children earlier in the day, when you're more alert, less tired, is more supportive for learning and comprehension. Maybe a bit of both? The bedtime rituals right now include occasional breastfeeding and lots of gymnastics. You climb all over your mama, and make for the edge of the bed before she pulls you gently back to her bosom.
Do y'all still say words like 'bosom' in the future? Do you write with pen and paper? Do you walk in the woods? Are there woods left to walk in?
So much to wonder about.
There's a part of me that wants to address the matters of this day, here and now, to offer some context for you: what did the world look like when you arrived? (I'm also content being relatively unaware of the nuances of 1986, the year I was born, so I wonder too if this would be useful, either now or in the future.) What's critical is that climate change is the priority for most of the world, whether developed countries rallying to do something about it, or the rest of the world feeling its devastating effects. In my judgement, it took too long for humanity to get to this point of action, where it is cheaper to save the world than to ruin it, as they say. For now, for whatever it’s worth, it is trendy and profitable to at least pretend we are doing something.
Which brings me to a tender place, when I think about you living a whole human life on this planet which your ancestors messed up pretty bad. On behalf of all of them, and also for all the ways that I've contributed to making life harder on this brilliant planet, I am sorry. I am so very sorry. I do not know what impacts you and your loved ones feel, or will later. I do not know if it will help or harm to say that it wasn't always like this, that even when I was young, the winters in Alaska were bone-cold, and animals and birds and fish filled the wild spaces with their nighttime gaze and patterns of flight and feed and stalk; the rivers were full and flowing with abundance; the coniferous trees across the western US and Canada were tall and green and mysterious and alive.
What I hear amongst the humans around us in these post-pandemic months is a desire to return to the land. Often, the dream is literal: let's move someplace rural that has water and other good folks. The deeper meaning I choose to make is that many of us in the cities are caught up in the race that is causing the earth such damage, and that some are called to slow down—as the covid-19 pandemic gave us all the opportunity to feel—and to reconnect to the quieter, more-than-human wisdom all around us.
I don't know if that's true for others, and in this moment I actually don't much care what the data says, in terms of which lifestyle is more efficient and so on. The fact that we can even have these types of conversations exemplifies our privilege, and our lost-ness. As we in the United States wrestle with the atrocities that built this country, and how they continue to shape it, I wonder if that reconciliation will be its undoing. I am for that, if it looks like the stewarding of this land returns to the folks who don't need to own it to care for it.
Humans are great, but they're so complicated. It's exhausting for me to interact with most of them. (You're an exception to that, and so is your mama. That's real.) I wonder if that will be different for you. As it is, you seem to thrive when the adults pass you around, when you're crawling about with other babies—how you love to engage!
A little context: this letter is not the first I've written to you, but the first in a series that I'm going to send out as a Substack newsletter. I'm doing that not necessarily because I want to share my personal everything with the world— especially then to ask them to pay for it—but rather because I know there is something special here, in our relationship, that might be useful, or even potentially healing, for some folks to read or hear or experience. I can hold those pieces. Someday, you and I will talk about it, and I'll hand you the info to the investment savings account that all the paid subscription funds went into, and maybe there will be enough for us to share some ice cream.
I love you, poco mono.
Til next time,
your papa Sean