Thirty Four

Reading last year’s birthday post reveals to me what a different state of mind I occupied in this short span of a year. Here’s what I thought: life is in a steady grind, I work at BigCo, my wife is pregnant, and I’m going to sail kicking and screaming (for effect) into the sunset of the life of a salary man. I’m going to make a big show of both the sacrifice and joy it is to be a father; I’m going to figure it out and explain it to my friends who are afraid of the prospect of children. I’m going to give up the notion of grad school and be more practical (safe) since I’m not going to have time for frivolity. My child is going to be, despite all the odds, a rampant success, a fulfillment of his or her parent's deferred dreams, hopes, visions, wishes, etc and etc.

Now things are different. Derailed. Demolished. I’m turning 34 in a few minutes and what I have to show for it is a kind of emptiness that is created when life that is full is drained. The child I planned would take me so many places is gone. I wake up each day with that realization, a steadily sinking one that becomes more real with each passing minute: a fuzzy notion that everything is wrong, a dreadful nagging about rare misfortunes, a concrete realization when I see her little ballerina socks on my end table, and then a depressing wall when I’m up and trying to remember what it felt like to take on a day with the innocence of hope.

I don’t have much to show for turning 34 at all except that amazing experience of being a father being given and taken away.

This is the part where I’m supposed to write about the little sliver of hope, or about God, perhaps quoting a verse or two. “What a heartwarming struggle!” you might say to yourselves and then next year I’ll have a pleasant confirmation of that little sliver of hope I wrote about on my previous birthday. The road through shadows and death will have come out to a pristine oasis of a deeper self.

It might be so. Check back in a year and I might have all those wonderful things to share. I’m old enough and tired enough to accept that storyline.

But right now the thing that is inexorable is that the struggle and hurt I’m writing about here in vague terms has a name – her name is Lael. She was beautiful. She cried a lot but we could usually calm her down by bouncing on an exercise ball. I’d hold her sometimes when she slept and when she was awake she’d play with a toy that would play the same songs over and over – songs that many a nonparent would find annoying but which I would give anything to hear again now. She would fall asleep in the baby swing with her head always cocked to her left. She had long eyelashes. I fed her a bottle on most nights. She didn’t sleep through the night for a long time and when she finally did, Kristin and I were so happy. I was exhausted all the time but I was happy. I made two big realizations that I’ll always hang onto: that of all the creations I dream up in the totality of my imagination, she was the best thing I will ever attribute to myself, and that no man knows his capacity to love until he has children.

So here’s to 34, being broken, and to the daughter I lost on father’s day.