except perhaps to be kind

a day's review

Dear Z.,

Today was the first warm day of the season. In the evening you played in the water in the blue plastic pool on the back deck. The spring deluge last week nearly filled it, and you’ve been slinging 1/3 cup at a time all over the yard since the sun came out. When enough water pooled atop the table, you licked it up. Sometimes you lick cars when it’s rained. Other times you pull at the door handles, wanting like anything to drive.

I’m halfwaiting for you to find an unlocked car, and then what? Fugitive toddler bandit, often heard yelling “Ride it?!” as he enters target vehicles. Prefers little blue trucks, just like the book you recite as you loop your way to sleep at some ungodly hour, Max Richter’s Sleep droning on repeat, one slow note after another.

It’s ridiculous how much I love you, Z. Last night as you went upstairs to bed with mama, you said “good night papa i love you.” For me it was like getting washed across the deck of a fishing boat by a rogue ocean wave. Took me a minute to recover. If you ever experience that, you might notice how very alive you feel afterward.

As you slung water with a measuring cup usually used for pancakes, I imagined the kiddos in Rafah right now, playing with who knows what, laughing and jostling each other as caregivers stand by experiencing whatever they’re feeling, maybe some wild concoction of sweetbitter joy and grief and anger and despair and hope and exhaustion and hunger and fear and maybe acceptance and so much more that I cannot possibly comprehend.

There are things in this world my son which I do not know how to speak about with you yet. I am sure you will learn of some of them before you read this letter.

One of the tightropes I walk with this project is to focus on writing to you, rather than using this platform to speak to other adults. Another tightrope (I don’t know why I’m using that term, it just came out) is that I have no idea if or when you might read this, so I often wonder who exactly I am writing to—you as the toddler who scratches at the skin of my neck when you’d rather walk than be carried, the toddler who cuddles up to me at night and pats my scraggly beard and asks for kisses when you’ve bonked your head—or am I writing to a teenaged Z. who feels everything (including awkward sometimes)? Or are you an invincible twentysomething out there on your own, learning how to do life on your terms?

I just can’t know. So in some ways I’m just writing this for me, partly because I’m more comfortable writing for an audience of one than many. There are fewer rules that way, you know. Or just more broken ones laying around like chewed-up seatbelts.

Where was I? Right. The kids in Rafah. I guess I have a wish that at some point you develop a deep sense of how blessed you are in this life, to have the mama you do, to play and eat and laugh and move like you’ve been able to, and to be surrounded and held by amazing humans who love the fucking shit out of you.

And I don’t need you to do anything about all of that, except perhaps to be kind.

See you in the morning, monkey.
your papa Sean