Dear Son,
Welcome to the world.
First thing I want to tell you is that right now, what gives me the greatest pleasure is just watching you – you sleeping, you awake. You smiling, you grimacing. You blinking, you winking and you giving those innumerable expressions no dictionary has the words to describe. They are simply so many. Most of the adult faces I know, including my own can manage only four or five. Where do so many come to you from?
Or are you telling me that as we grow up, the multitude of expressions we once had coalesce into a few we now possess? Do we lose most of those feelings as we go along?
People told me I’d all of a sudden become very responsible (yes, they thought I wasn’t) when you come. They said life will change. They also said you’ll be a huge responsibility. Possibly. Right now, though, you are just 3 kgs.
Frankly, I haven’t felt an emotionally overwhelming moment so far. Yes. When your little hands shivered in my arms after the nurse handed a new born you to me, I felt an urgent helplessness – wanted to stop your shivering but didn’t know what to do. Yes, I can sit for hours just watching you and I love to wrap myself around you and hold you close to my chest. But, not one moment has been an unleashing of a tsunami. May be that’s how it really happens – slowly and definitely.
I want you to grow big and strong and happy. I want you to be brave. I want you to be kind and loving. I know, a long wishlist for such a small you. But dads are selfish. Yours too is no different.
There, you’ve already started helping me understand my dad in turn.
The day you were born, I saw a small puppy, near the super market and it occurred to me that he too would have been born just like you. Possibly he too was as precious to his parents. And I also saw a child begging at the traffic light – a torn sweater in the chilling December cold. He too would have been as precious to his parents. I don’t know what it means. Most probably, random ramblings of a newly minted dad. Whatever.
Million things I want to tell you and we will talk as we go along. A couple, I think are most important.
First, do everything like the only thing that exists in the world is you and the thing you are doing. I have done things both ways and the most rewarding experiences have come when I’ve done them as if nothing else exists – no past, no future, no people, no causes, no consequences. When you do something and your mind is elsewhere, that’s when you don’t enjoy it and that’s when it doesn’t work out.
And then, be brave. No matter who or what you face, no matter when or where you face them. You will realize sooner or later that the most important thing in life is to take a stand, your stand. No matter what others, including me, tell you.
Love,
Dad