Baby,

On the eve of your first birthday, I am starting a blog. I wanted to find an outlet to share the endless thoughts I have about you, the world you are growing in and my own wondrous and fearful experiences of fatherhood. I tried journaling to you, but the smoothness of pen on paper cannot capture the wild clanking energy that my words need. So I sit at a computer and hammer away the feelings that I want to expose to you. I chose to make these feelings public as part jubilant declaration of the love I have for you and part necessary motivation to keep writing these things to you. I am your Dada and these are reflections of the days we have shared. Hence the title of this project, ‘DADA DAYS’.

I don’t know exactly when our adventure together started. Maybe it was when you chose the moment that I was resting my head on Mama’s belly to let me feel your first kick. Or the first time I saw a picture of you as a little speckled dot, reminiscent of this famous image of Earth taken from so far away that you cannot make out all the baffling beauty it encompasses. Or the mysterious time when you were conceived, one that Mama and I have tried endlessly to discover which precise encounter it was that sparked you. It could have even been the moment that Mama and I first met because the purity of her smile and intensity of her determination on her face is so embodied in you that it feels like you were hiding deep inside her just waiting for your reveal.

Though in my mind, our journey started with a dance. It was deep into the night of your birth when me and Mama swayed gently back and forth, moving our bodies in unison only to the sounds of her groans in the dimly lit hospital room. She was in a fiery pain that felt unbearable to watch, let alone experience. She put her full weight onto my shoulders and we moved slowly in an attempt to try to whisk away her hurt. It was here, in a brief moment of intermission between contractions, that I fully felt your grand introduction to this world was imminent. Your face-to-face introduction to me. A clear, definitive and abrupt change to my life that held my full conscious awareness.

It is a wild feeling holding your child for the first time. It is your heart taking its first steps outside of your body. I watched you watch the world, as your eyes darted back and forth. You looked scared, yet unfazed. Both pensive and highly alert simultaneously. It was the first of countless times that I wanted to be in your experience, like an unobtrusive host floating through your brain.

In my anticipation for tomorrow, I have learned that birthdays add a whole layer of depth to the parents of a child that I could have never appreciated before. For you, it will eventually be a time when people who you haven’t thought of in a while think of you. You will reflect on where you were and what you were doing a year before. And you will count one more arbitrary number in an existential exercise. All while eating cake with some people that you love. For me, it will forever be attached to the night I danced with Mama and you, slipping slowly into fatherhood, until I finally got to lay my eyes on you.

So here it is. My first post. A letter. A birthday gift. I don’t know what this project will turn into or how it will evolve. If nothing else, it can reveal the strange and wondrous experiences of a modern dad.

It is an impossible task to find words to explain the way I love you. This is my attempt to try.