Beloved children,
Today is my last day of paternity leave.
For the past four months, I have preoccupied myself almost exclusively with being a husband, father, and homemaker.
I have done most of the laundry, most of the cleaning, most of the cooking, and all of the grocery shopping. I have learned how to make shallot sauce and breakfast quiche and rhubarb crisp.
I have assembled a hundred Lego towers and read your books shelf to shelf and back again. I have played firefighter and trains and apple orchard.
I have discovered through your eyes the minutest details in our yard, bugs that were invisible from my height, twigs whose significance I never could have guessed. I have picked strawberries I didn’t know we had. I have baked “cakes” made of pinecones and water in a bucket under the Jeep.
I have planned treasure hunts, and feasted at imaginary picnics, and shared in fits of contagious giggles.
I have petted your hair. I have admired your ears, your eyes, your toes. I have worn you on my chest, held you in my arms, carried you on my shoulders, carted you on my back.
I have changed ten thousand diapers and taken ten million photographs. I have exceeded my Google storage.
I have watched you discover one another, first a little boy ecstatic at the long-expected arrival of baby sister, then a little girl wide-eyed with wonder at another small creature like her making funny sounds and constantly buzzing about.
I have bathed you, washed your hands, trimmed your nails, wiped your tears. I have brushed your teeth. I have offered my knuckle to suck on.
I have risen at your waking and sang you to sleep.
I have missed hardly a moment.
Day after day, I have marveled at how small you are yet how heavy you can be, how you fill me with light but exhaust me by bedtime.
Day after day, I have witnessed you do the most magical and the most mundane things, and I have seen how they are often the same.
Day after day, I have led a most ordinary life in a world often no bigger than our living room.
Day after day, I have been blessed with the inestimable gift of presence.
Of course, it’s not like I’m going on an Apollo mission. Just because paternity leave is ending doesn’t mean I will suddenly be absent from your lives. In fact, since I am returning to a job that has gone remote, technically I won’t be going anywhere at all.
Yet our time together will not be quite so singular, not quite so complete in its simplicity. There may be a few more interruptions, a few more sorry, not right now’s, a few more breaks to watch Peppa Pig.
Speaking of Peppa, I feel a bit like you do, son, when one of your cartoon episodes comes to an end. Even when we tell you in advance that it’s almost over, sometimes you can’t help but bawl. You just don’t want it to end. It’s like you feel the full devastation of a good thing coming to a close. I can relate.
We have been working with you on the importance of gratitude in these moments. Rather than whine at what’s lost, we want you to be thankful for what was—and I, too, have so very much to be thankful for in the last four months. This is certainly no moment to whine.
I do sometimes wonder, though, what you would do if we never turned off Peppa, if we let you soak up episode after episode until you had your fill. How long would the streak last? Five episodes? Fifteen? Two hundred? Even when you tired of it, even when you realized it was time to move onto the next thing, I have to imagine there’d still be a piece of you wishing the moment could last forever.