Beloved daughter,
You were born on the eve of a pandemic. Well, not quite the eve—three days prior, to be precise.
Two months before you were born, I had heard on the radio of a new virus spreading through Wuhan, China. It was half a world away, as innocuous to me as an NPR soundbite. A few people were talking about the virus spreading to the US through Washington State and how we needed to stock up on hand sanitizer and face masks. These lone voices were a small minority and, frankly, they sounded kind of paranoid.
Well, they were right.[1] To spare you the details—and if you really want those, I’m sure you can dig up the many libraries’ worth of news coverage produced in the past few months—I will say that I don’t know anyone who has lived through anything like this before. They call it a once-in-a-century disease. Seemingly everyone on the planet has been touched by it, if not directly, then indirectly thanks to the lockdowns that have driven people stir crazy and sent the economy reeling.
For our family specifically, we have been very slightly affected compared to many, many others. As I write this, Mom and I both still have our jobs. Our health is good. We know very few people who have contracted the disease, and no one who has died from it.
In our daily routines, life is different in odd ways. Mom hasn’t been to a grocery store since before you were born. We haven’t had a friend set foot in our house in months. Your brother has developed an acute shyness toward strangers that we’re not sure to attribute to his stage of development or to the corona spooks. When we do see people, we visit in the front yard or from the safety of our door as they stand awkwardly in the driveway. We play board games and do escape rooms online. Evening walks feel like a game of live-action Pac-Man where everyone’s a ghost. And handshakes and hugs? Quaint, if not bygone customs, it would seem.
For you in particular, the main effect of the pandemic is that you’ve led the life of a hermit. By the time your brother was your age, he had been all over. He had taken photos at your uncle’s crowded Christmas light display, ushered in the new year with friends and family, accompanied me and Mom each week to an ultimate Frisbee match in a busy gymnasium, and road tripped to Colorado to see family. The only public place you’ve visited is a doctor’s office.
But what do you care? After all, your brother didn’t get much from those early experiences. Like you, he was still developing vision beyond a foot or two in front of his face. Fortunately, I suppose, your world is so small right now that being “quarantined” inside a two-bedroom home is as restrictive as a criminal being “imprisoned” in the northern hemisphere: there is still a whole lot to explore.
In the cloistered little life you’ve had so far, what seems significant about the pandemic is not what you have missed in the world, but what the world has missed in you. As people begin to re-emerge like startled turtles from their shells, they are entering a world where you are no longer a newborn, and that is a loss indeed. Virtually everyone, most of our family even, has missed out on that brand new baby magic.
I don’t mean to say you aren’t magic now. You are still way cute, probably cuter now than you were at the start. Now you are doing things like smiling and cooing and laughing—oh, your laughter! If they could bottle that stuff, they could fly rocket ships with it.
But there is something uniquely awesome—not just “neat,” I mean, but worthy of awe—about a newborn, as if the mark of the Creator’s hand is easier to spot. For how little you did in your first weeks of life, it was amazingly hard to look away from you. It was like noticing the details of a flower for the very first time. You were simply exquisite, and insanely fragile, and abounding in lines and contours and shades and expressions that we had never, ever seen. We would stare at you to try to learn your face, this little creature we had glimpsed only in dreams and ultrasounds.
Thanks to COVID, people have also missed out on holding you at your littlest. Again, you still love to be held and I still love to hold you, but it was different in the beginning. For one, your body was crazy small. Eight pounds? Are you kidding me? That’s less than my head, and I carry that thing around all the time.
You had such scarce control over those eight pounds, too. Your limbs moved unpredictably, your eyes wandered aimlessly. You were constantly slumped, a total slave to gravity. Without the steadying of our hands, your body was always making its way down to the next solid surface, like one of those Plinko discs on The Price is Right. You were the very image of helplessness.
If you weren’t crying or eating, you were sleeping, and we gobbled up our chances to have that happen when we were holding you. I swear, there is no pleasure more serene than falling asleep with a newborn dozing on your chest.[2] If virtual reality one day upgrades to Holodeck status, that is the first program I will download.
Everything about you at that age—your warbly cries, your constant fatigue, your insatiable appetite for closeness—it all expressed a sort of trust that is unique to a brand new human: unique, I think, because it was neither conferred nor earned but simply necessary. It was part of your makeup, by design, to need us. What choice did you have but to fall asleep in our arms? Whose else’s arms would you fall asleep in?
Yes, it’s true that you still don’t really have a choice in the matter, but now, larger and more “with it” and, if I’m honest, more humanlike than you were those first few weeks, your radical dependence doesn’t carry quite the same poignancy that it once did. The first hints of independence, albeit subtle, have poked through. You lift your head off the floor; you fix your gaze; you hold onto objects. Your helplessness diminishes day by day.
It’s a development, obvious and inevitable as it is, that makes me both beam and tear up. I am proud to watch you make sense of yourself and this world you’ve been born into, yet sad to say goodbye to that tiny, exquisite, needful girl.
Don’t get me wrong—the pride is nearly continual, the sadness but occasional. Watching you grow is little loss and mostly gain.
There are moments, though, when I wish I could just stop the train, when I wish I could take a photo and jump into the frame to live there forever. But then you would never become the girl, the woman, that you were made to be, and the world would always be stuck in a pandemic, plagued, among many other ailments, by the inability to meet my darling daughter.
It’s not an exchange I’d ever be willing to make. The world has already missed out on too much.
[1] Mostly right. At first, it was reported that the virus entered through Washington, but it was later discovered that, like a thief in the night, it had entered through California some time earlier without detection. This is one among millions of little facts that have been reported ad nauseum, minutia that normally would go unnoticed by the majority of the public but, in this period of heightened anxiety and endless time at home, have been wolfed down like fistfuls of popcorn.
[2] PSA: When you grow up, don’t ever fall asleep like that with your own baby (or anyone else’s, for that matter) unless there is another adult in the room. When Mom or I napped with you, the other one always stayed awake, lest you slid off our chest or our twentyfold weight rolled over on top of you.