Ailey.

I have a daughter.  She is four months old and I can’t really remember a lot of my life before her.

For those of you who do not have a daughter, or a baby of any sexual identification, you know how I am feeling right now.  It is at once the most frustrating and fulfilling, heartbreaking and joyous, scariest most beautiful thing I have ever gone though, and it is just getting started. These may seem to be all very contradictory (and they are) but let me explain.

It started from the very beginning.  When I first heard that my amazing girlfriend and I were going to have a baby, the first thing that I began plotting – after I could speak and process thoughts more complex than uuhhh…… – was what kind of wood I was going to use to build the case for the Heisman (but not worrying about it too much because I had a few years, at least, until football became an issue).  This was the general train of thought; camping, football, hiking, football, go-carts, football until the ultrasound technician reported the absence of a required piece of hardware.  Suddenly it was all pink things and frills and the wood was going to have to be different for the Track-And-Field or Volleyball trophies, a jarring and very contradictory way of thought for a person who always assumed, despite a relatively good understanding of the basics of genetics and the uncertainty contained therein, that he was going to have  a son when the time came.

The contradictions in the way that she makes me feel come from the very nature of her existence.  Even a dog will stop making noise or have a relatively good chance of making it known to you what they need to be happy again if they are in distress.  This is true for them from a very early age.  A baby, on the other hand, does not do this.  Taking into account the fact that a two month old baby is basically a brain-stem that needs to be fed and changed and is attached to a loudspeaker, understanding what it needs to remain healthy and stop using said scream-amplification device takes some finesse.  It can be frustrating and almost maddening in a way that I can’t convey in words when everything that you do that you think is right results only in more crying and screaming and carrying on in a way that proves that girls and drama are inextricably connected on a genetic level.  The odd thing is that once you figure it out and she goes right back to giggling and drooling and laughing you feel like more of a man than He-Man, Gi-Joe and Mike Rowe rolled into one, and the smile that she gives you makes you happier than when your football team makes it to the Rose Bowl (but not wins It, because I am a Coug, and we have yet to do that While I have been alive)

As she gets older it seems that a different set of challenges meets me every day.  what made her believe that I was the sum total of all gods every worshiped by man one day just makes her cry harder the next.  Every strange thing that she does makes me convinced that she has any number of genetic problems or mental or motor diseases or was kidnapped by aliens or IS an alien or something that I can not even fathom or understand is happening and it is stressful in a way that I did not know stress could present itself.  Then I calm down and read any of the number of resources at my disposal and realize that babies have been doing that very same thing for… well probably for roughly 4 million or so years and that baby monkeys and snakes and dolphins do it too.  The relief and slight embarrassment that I feel after what should not have been an epiphany is like that first pull off a really good glass of whiskey when you feel your insides warm up and the tension drain out of your muscles and you understand that everything is going to be OK.

It is terrifying, the idea of raising a female in this world.  I have known, dated, met and witnessed so many crazy, screwed up, sad female cases of poor parenting in my lifetime that I kind of assumed that all a man had to do was say no once to the wrong thing and BAM! his daughter was going to end up wearing black all the time, listening to Manson and having more issues than the New York Times.  I know now that this is not the truth, but there are so many things in the world that can derail the the job that I am trying to do that someday having a well adjusted and normal woman for a daughter has become my mission in life.

I’m not trying to say that I am super dad.  Far from it I firmly believe that I don’t have all of the necessary tools or personality traits that are required for even the title of great dad.  The beautiful thing that I have found out so far in this first tenths of a percent of the life I am going to have with this amazing creature is that I don’t have to have all of the tools right now.  They will come with time – age means experience and all that rot – and if they don’t, I can pretend.

All told here so far I am amazed by this little scientific and psychological experiment that I have living in a room ten feet from mine.  She brings out parts of me I didn’t know I had, or was even capable of.

Stay tuned for more.

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