Dear Arlandria,
Yesterday you got your two month shots! Those vaccines are going to trigger your immune system for mostly the first time, and that’s going to mean you will not have to worry about things like Polio, Chicken Pox, etc., for the rest of your entire life.
It also means that you felt pain somewhere on your body for more or less the first time in your entire newborn life. And I hear that the scream you let out was more or less earth shattering for your Mom, who cried while watching you experience that pain.
I’m sure it hurt. I’m sure deep down this is the type of betrayal you never thought you’d experience when you were warm and growing inside of your Mother’s belly. Back then you thought life might just be a blurry pink warm existence with the muffled sounds of the Hamilton Soundtrack, Foo Fighters, and your Mom’s voice and my voice too.
Unfortunately, life is not all those things, all the time. Sometimes, as you’ve learned, life is cold, or it doesn’t respond to you crying immediately, or it puts you in the arms someone with a face and voice you don’t recognize, or it doesn’t do exactly what you want at exactly the moment you ask, and you let us know, loudly and severely.
Life is sometimes cold on your hands, or it swaddles you when you really, really, don’t want it. Sometimes life is poop in your diaper, and when you try to tell us, we feed you that lame soy formula with the stupid sticky cereal that always blocks the nipple and then, even then, life doesn’t feed you as well as you want it. Sometimes life is a bunch of concepts, material, and ideas that you just can’t even make sense of and didn’t ask for a single bit of it.
But Life is unexpected like that.
It’s also unexpected in good ways.
Sometimes life is Mommy’s voice in the mornings, shaking your legs and saying, “Thunder! Feel the Thunder! Lightning then the Thunder! Thunder!” Who knew Imagine Dragons would sing your favorite song.
Sometimes life is Daddy playing an electric guitar (and you don’t know enough guitar to know that it’s being played extremely badly either) for you.
Sometimes life is Mommy and Daddy singing your favorite lullaby, “You are my sunshine.”
Sometimes life is the koala bears you didn’t know you’d love so much - so damn much - on the swing you didn’t know would rock you just the way Mommy does. Or when its dark in our room and all you can see and sense is how tired and exhausted Mommy is, and how much sleep she wants, and you want it too, but choose to fight it. It's a dance you and Mommy play often.
Sometimes life is sleeping all day in a buzzy warm cradle while Mommy and Daddy sleep in their huge warm bed, and we all dream of the beautiful life we’ll share together.
You survived your shots, the same way you survived your first two months of life. With strength, and cries, and poopy diapers. Each one of them a blessing in disguise. You have your Mother’s strength, and your Daddy’s eyebrows. And I can’t wait for the rest of our lives together, all the shots and the cold and the blankets and the music that awaits us.
Love,
Your Father
