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.