A Single Guy Reflects on Raising Children

First, the thing, which I felt compelled to write in July of 2012:

I want to have a daughter. I want to make love to a pretty woman, my wife, and I want to hold her close while our girl grows inside her. I want to look at the sonographs and press my hand on her belly while our daughter quickens in her. I’ll be terribly envious of her the whole time, of how close she gets to be to the new girl, but I’ll be too happy to care.

When she gives birth, when she’s born, I’ll see my wife and me blended, unified into a complex clip who’s not quite either of us. She’ll be a screaming, needy bundle of newness at first, in awe of everything, and I’ll fall in love immediately.

When summer comes, I want to take her to the islands, to the mountains, to the deserts. I want to show her white blood cells in a clear blue sky and nights so dark the Milky Way swirls from east to west as the satellites wander west to east. I want to take her flying and let her feel wings in her fingertips, and take her hiking till her feet march all the way up the great volcanic summits. When the rains come back, we’ll hunker down and I’ll teach her about the people and places and the ways the universe works. We’ll talk endlessly about the world around us and the worlds far away, and figure out a little more of who we are.

I want to watch her grow up, that beautiful way girls do. I want to talk to her about calculus and conjugation while her mind blossoms into the fullness of adulthood and she dips her toes into grown-up-ness for the first time. I want to see her alter, and become that form that’s the baseline of physical beauty. The book of me, and the book of my wife, will be woven together a billion times in her skin and in her blood, and I want to look at this beautiful creature and know that it’s a part of me that looks back.

That, among other things, is what I want.

Now to comment:

There are a few things going on here that seem worthy of some discussion. This was several years before I would be married and have children. Evidently this was something on my mind even back then. The fixation on having a daughter, as opposed to a child in general, says something about me. Is this a product of the male gaze going haywire, or is this some kind of pseudo-feminism, wanting to do my part so to speak to put at least one woman on equal footing with the start I got to life? Probably a little of both.

Frankly I find this embarrassing, mostly because the execution is sloppy and none of these thoughts are really complete. It's a nice idea muddled by fixation on the wrong things. I would also prefer to stick to feminism unambiguously. Hopefully I'm doing a better job of that now.

Also this is clearly a love letter to the Pacific northwest, at least in part. That's still something I haven't gotten out of my system.