Average Post

I am supposed to be asleep. I should know better than to write while supine, worse to publish when my BS detector is so compromised. Some things that I write look so good in the dark:

The cars out on Turnpike have all gone home and parked, and my family has fallen happily asleep at the other end of that dark hall I am looking down. I am here, on our couch in the glow of my laptop listening to the grandfather clock ring through numbers I should only hear during the day. It is quiet except for that and the squeaks of my daughter swinging next to me. I think I came out here because she wasn’t sleeping, and here I am awake writing about how she is asleep. I am sure it will make perfect sense in the morning.

She looks like the pope; all wrinkled, hunched and peaceful. She spends most of her time looking that way…Or pissed off that we are trying to disturb her perfect baby sleep. She is shrouded in mystery. She is my daughter. My only one. I have no idea who she is. They say I will be wrapped around her finger, and somehow I don’t doubt it. I am an easy target. But for now I sit around looking at her, thinking that she will reveal something about who she is going to be. Something more than: Molly Leanne, 9 lbs 1 oz, lots of black hair. I look expectantly as though she will look up and make eye contact and say “Hi daddy I love you.” But she just sits there looking like the pope, grunting and going cross-eyed smelling like a vitamin store*. I am in love with who she will be; In spite of, or especially because of the fact that I have no control over who that is. I know that in three weeks I will know so much more, in 3 months even more, and in 3 years even more. For tonight, nine nights old, she is all guess work.


*Author’s note: While all U2 fans know that it is true that “Freedom has a scent like the top of a newborn baby’s head” Bono gave us little info on what the other end has a scent like. Compared to the scent of a toddler diaper, I am happy to call a newborn diaper "freedom."