Dad 2022: The Present Now

This morning you and I listened to Bob Dylan while mom was at work. You bounced in the bouncer and Apricot lounged on a bundled up blanket on the couch while I assembled your high chair, with a little help from some YouTube videos. A lot has been changing. You turned six months two weeks ago. You sleep in your crib now, in your own room, by yourself. And you sleep for ten or eleven hours a night. Also, you are making all kinds of sounds with your mouth. You are a vocal extemporizer extraordinaire. You’ve discovered how to blow raspberries with your lips, and sometimes you and I will blow them back and forth at each other. I have to say that mom is not the biggest fan of this particular game. You love the jumperoo and the baby walker that our friend Alison gave you. You steer the walker around the kitchen and the hall, and you swing the jumperoo to and fro, up and down. You have discovered your feet and you grab one or both whenever you can. You are alert, curious, fully engaged, a role model for the rest of us. You smile and giggle and sometimes fuss and sigh. To me, and to others, you seem a happy soul.

Dylan sings that the present now will later be past, and I feel this in my bones. You have given me the gift of being wholly in the now. I am the most present I have ever been with you, laying on the floor beside you, staring at you, communicating as we do, fully content and in the moment, in that glorious moment. Enchanted, inhaling, living. I am present with you and also with mom and also with my thoughts and my feelings. I am present in my body and my breath. I am present on the phone with friends. I try to be present even in stress, of which we’ve had our share of late, though I sometimes give in to revisiting what I should simply let go. Mainly I just try to feel the stress and name it and then turn back to you (and mom always helps me think it all through).

I am present because I know that the present now will later be past. I want to savor the minutes before they move on. I want to make choices that set me down face-to-face with our family, with you, with all that matters and is goodhearted and true. In 1963, Bob Dylan wrote a big theme song, about history and politics and a mutable world, but he also wrote about the inevitability of change. Every single now is already fading, rapidly, so we may as well choose how to inhabit it. And, my smiling, vocal, foot-loving daughter—I choose you.