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Frustrating the Father

Beloved daughter,

Your ability to frustrate me is amazing. It is remarkable in two directions: though you are so small, you can unbalance me so greatly. How could someone who weighs 12 pounds, someone who must be carried anywhere she wishes to go, someone who cannot speak or wield tools or consume solid food bring a grown man to the edge of his self-control?

While I am sure each baby has their own unique ways of frustrating mom or dad, in your case, nothing boils my water like your refusal to eat from a bottle. With your brother, we had no problem introducing him to a bottle; the dude liked to eat, no matter the source. This led me to believe, naively, that every baby must be that way; I didn’t know that rejecting the bottle was even a thing that babies would think to do.

You have been kind enough to shatter my illusion.

If you struggled against the bottle for a few minutes each time, if you fussed and whined and made a scene before eventually giving in and saying, “Well, I don’t like this thing but hey, I gotta eat,” I could handle it. But you don’t just fight it; you straight up reject it. You become a little Gandhi fasting in protest against the terrible injustice of the bottle. You just won’t take it.

Mom and I have adjusted the independent variables. We have tried different rooms, times, positions, temperatures. We have amassed various bottles and inserts and nipples. I have sung, shushed, rhymed, and rapped. I have tried it with Mom nearby and with her afar. I have tried it with a fox, I have tried it in a box. (Well, not literally that last one, but you get the idea.)

Despite our best efforts, no matter the gymnastics we perform to convince you to eat the one and only food you ever eat and the one and only food you need to survive, when that bottle touches your tongue, you react one of two ways:

If you’re calm, you act as if you’ve never heard of a nipple. The milk pools in your mouth and then comes trickling out like you were just bit by a rare snake that’s caused your swallowing muscles to undergo paralysis.

Or, if you’re not calm—and we always get there eventually—you act as if the bottle itself is the snake, venom dripping from its fangs. You spit it out like a curse, your eyes tightening into a hot cry as you realize that your own father has tried to assassinate you.

If the hill you had chosen to die on was something inessential, like refusing a certain toy or swaddle or swing, I wouldn’t mind. I would probably try a few times, then give up. No big deal. But the hill you’ve chosen to die is one on which you could actually die: namely, starvation.

What really upends me about the whole thing is the obvious necessity of what you’re refusing. Mom works hard to extract this precious, nearly magical elixir from her body; we store it in carefully marked containers like it’s enriched plutonium; we set the conditions to laboratory precision; and then plah, you spew it out (or, just as insulting, let it dribble down your neck and soak into your shirt).

The one plus from your bottle aversion, other than extra cuddle time with Mom, is that it has prompted some spiritual reflection in me. As your brother can attest based on the letters I’ve written him, when I reflect on these fatherly things I can’t help but think of Fatherly things, too. And when I ponder just how terribly vexed I am by your irrational refusal of the very milk of life, I can only imagine what continual state of frustration our heavenly Father must experience as He watches us spit, spew, and dribble His blessings all over ourselves.

Just as a small example, one of Paul’s famous lines comes to mind: “For the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6.23). For most of my life I have thought of this verse as a great admonition: I took it as a mortal warning, a memorably worded description of just how seriously we need to take sin.

And that may be what it is. Perhaps, though, it is also simply a reminder of a plain truth, something we should already know, similar to when I cradle you in my arms and whisper, “Okay, baby girl, this is good stuff, I promise. You need it to live.” I shouldn’t have to say it, yet apparently I do; and even so, I cannot force you to see the truth of it.

I think of God giving us the same message—the same painfully obvious truth, whispered a thousand different times in a thousand different conditions:

I shouldn’t have to say this, but if you eat that one deadly fruit I told you about, you won’t be well.

I shouldn’t have to say this, but if you use others, you will end up feeling used.

I shouldn’t have to say this, but if you live for yourself, you will end up hellishly alone.

I shouldn’t have to say this, but if you go this journey without me, it will be unbearably long and unbearably heavy.

Thanks to you, my anti-bottle rebel, I can imagine, in the tiniest way, His frustration when His children hear these messages and respond to the Bread of Life with a cavalier “no thanks.”

You know what the funny thing is, though? You don’t always say no.

On two occasions, for whatever reason,[1] you gave in and had a little meal with me. While on the one hand that adds a maddening layer to the whole situation, as if you are playing some sick, backwards version of baby Russian roulette, it also injects a bit of hope. If you’ve eaten once, I know you can do it again, contrary to the dribbling and spewing and wailing.

And on that point I can relate to the Father in another tiny way. If, like Him, I had no recourse, no backup option (i.e. Mom) when you reject the bottle, I would do anything in my power to get you fed. I would buy every bottle, watch every YouTube video, consult every specialist, attempt every position. I would get a dropper and squeeze it into your mouth one droplet at a time. I would swallow it myself and regurgitate it to you if that is what it took.

And you know what I wouldn’t do? I would never, ever, ever, ever say, “Well, I guess my daughter isn’t eating, then. So much for that. Starvation it is.” A father does not just let his child starve, even if by some madness she would choose to.

I suppose that is why the poet calls God the hound of heaven: He will not, perhaps cannot, stop chasing us. And I suppose it is why Paul, shortly after the “wages of sin” passage, tells the Romans just how dogged our Father is:

“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8.38-39).

Is it possible that in the final analysis, none of us will be able to withstand the persistence of the Father, that we will, despite our squirming and fussing, ultimately be no match for His patient hand, that we will finally give in and eat?

I’m not sure. But I do know He will never stop trying.

[1] I recall your brother being somewhere else each time, but hey, I can’t exactly get rid of him every time you need to eat.

A Poem for You

Beloved daughter,

This is the first time I have written you one of these letters. For the past couple years, I have used this online platform as a way to reflect on my relationship with your brother, and all the miracles and mysteries and fantastic moments of fatherhood.

Soon I will be retracing with you many of the same milestones that I experienced with your brother. And I must confess, little one, that until you emerge into the world and we start getting to know you a bit better, it’s been challenging for me to think outside that box of “retracing.”

I have no doubt, though, that when they come to pass, each of these moments will feel totally original with you. Mom’s pregnancy certainly has felt original. When we found out we were pregnant the first time, we had the sudden excitement of becoming parents. We had new skins to grow into as mother and father.

When we found out about you, by contrast, our essential identity as parents didn’t change, but the makeup of our family did. We also had another set of eyes through which to view you: your brother’s. He has come with us to nearly every doctor’s appointment and ultrasound, and naturally it has been my job, while the nurses and midwives tend to Mom, to watch him and make sure he doesn’t destroy any medical equipment. (He hasn’t—though he has discovered every button and screw on the examination bed, and he tried to hack into the doctor’s computer more than once.)

So when we’ve heard your heartbeat or seen your little face in the ultrasound monitor, it usually hasn’t been “Oh my goodness, there’s our daughter.” It’s more often been, “Look, Gabriel, there’s your sister.”

As fun and fascinating as it is to see this whole process through the eyes of a young toddler, recently I have been trying to make more space for cherishing you, just you, through my own eyes as your father. I suppose it has been my first exercise in playing parent to two, in managing that finite resource of fatherly attention. I have started to sit longer with those moments of “Look, there’s my daughter.”

To my surprise, one product of this intentional focus is a poem that I wrote for you. It was almost an accident. When I first sat down to write this letter, a sentence spilled out of my head onto the page, and I knew right away that it was the sort of line fit for a poem, not a letter. Do you know the last time I wrote a full poem? Neither do I—it’s been that long. And a rhyming poem? It may have been when I proposed to your mother. (I’ll tell you that story another day.)

If you end up an English major like your parents, you may one day study the poetic form that I am playing with here: the villanelle, which uses just two rhymes and recycles the same couplet at certain reprises throughout the stanzas. I have not remained true to the exact villanelle structure, but the form itself isn’t really the point. The point is to reflect on you, as an expectant parent, as your father, and as the father to your brother.

Here is my first-ever poem to my first-ever daughter.

Conceiving of You

Let us dwell on you, my child, my daughter,
as you drift and loll in the up-less deep,
hearing faint laughter muffled by water.

It was your brother who made me a father
and so a father I will always be—
though never, till now, to you, my daughter.

In brother’s eyes, is anything odder
than watching baby in the ultrasound screen,
a shaky white sketch etched in black water?

How could he know what outstanding honor
awaits him when finally he gets to meet
sister—the name he has for you, my daughter?

And for me, what blessing just to wonder
what wonder it will be to hold your body,
light as laughter and welcome as water.

I know you not yet. All I can offer
are these musings about a word so sweet—
sister for him, but for me, daughter,
who looks like laughter and sounds like water.

Nighttime Exchange

Beloved son,

Every once in a while, you wake up in the middle of the night hungry. Maybe you’re going through a growth spurt, or you’re having a bad dream, or you ate bad the evening before. Who knows the real reason—Mom and I try not to overanalyze these things.

Whatever the cause, we’ve developed a routine in response:

Your crying wakes me up. Mom, strong sleeper she is, barely stirs.
I come to your room, where you’ve removed everything from your crib: pillow, blanket, binky, and stuffed pig companion lie strewn on the floor, and you’re standing in your crib, facing the door expectantly.
I give you a hug and ask what’s wrong. You sign for food, which, I only now realize as I write this, is a rare holdout in your language. Most of the words you once signed now emerge as spoken words, but in the middle of the night, anyway, it’s always your fingertips tapping your mouth, accompanied by an urgent hum of “hm, hm, hm.”
I pick you up and you drop all the weight of your head into my shoulder. I like step 4 very much.
To maximize your sleep time later on, I change your diaper. Sometimes you protest, but only for about half a second. You just don’t have the energy to mount a full-on resistance. Plus, I reassure you that we will get some food afterward, and by this point in your life, you are actually pretty good at understanding small delays in gratification.
Your diaper fresh and your body nestled back into my arms, we retrace our nighttime steps in the absolute dark of the kitchen. Parenthood has basically turned me into Batman when it comes to navigating unlit areas of the house. I glide through the dark, fetching a fruit pouch and some Goldfish from the pantry and a bowl and cup from the cupboards. Sometimes you remind me of our mission if I dawdle too long, for instance saying “bowl” or “eau” (water). After all, you know the routine: If you could write, you could document these steps just as well as I could. I fill the cup with water and the bowl with Goldfish, and we return to your room.
The whole process is strongly reminiscent of those late-night bottle feedings we would do when you were just months old, but this next part feels especially nostalgic. I put you on my lap and rock back and forth in the chair as you eat. What more basic bond is there between us than father feeding son. It’s always pouch, water, Goldfish, water. You suck down the pouch, then suck down some more with my help. You eat every single Goldfish, no matter how many I put in the bowl. (I’ve learned not to put very many.)
Once sated, you take your binky, give me one last cuddle, and lie back down in your bed. Sometimes when I’ve returned to Mom’s and my bedroom, I watch you in the monitor, lying on your back twirling your hair, your eyes like glassy black orbs in the camera’s night vision. You never fuss, though; you wind back down and drift off to finish out your night of sleep.

This routine is occasional enough and so precious a bonding time that I never feel frustrated or impatient about having to get up to care for you. I know that your days of such neediness will not last forever, so in the sleepy quiet of the night, I savor every second of it.

It’s not all sentiment, though—from time to time, there is humor, too. Last night when we did this routine, you were getting to your last Goldfish, and the beauty of the moment nearly overwhelmed me. I leaned down and kissed your soft little head, and in the quiet sanctuary of your room, silent save for the gentle lullabies of your music monkey, I whispered, “Je t’aime.” Without missing a beat between crackers, you retorted, “no.”

I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. Maybe you were scolding me for adding unsanctioned material to the routine. Maybe you were imagining some subtext behind “I love you,” as if I were really saying, “okay, time to go back to bed.” Maybe you were just rehearsing one of your favorite words.

I’d rather think, though, that it was a Han Solo moment, your way of hearing me perfectly well and responding, “I know, Dad. I know.”