Highlight Reel - You've Got Me Feeling Emotions!
(Yes, that is a shoutout to my girl, 90s Mariah Carey. My interest waned after Butterfly.)
My hubby is a brilliant, witty, caring individual. But in the words of Hermione, he has the "emotional range of a teaspoon". He's the first to admit that he is a little robotic, a little Vulcan-like in his demeanour. Unless the man is a few shots deep in a bottle of Johnnie Walker, he is quiet and reserved. If you can believe it, there's a term for this in Danish which he recently learned and immediately identified with. He is the very opposite of a loud, boastful, attention-grabbing person; an anti-Kanye, if you will.
Parenthood has not made him boastful. But it has made him emotional.
I myself get teary when I think of how far my little NICU preemie has come. Now that she's 8 months old and learning new things every day, I am simultaneously excited for tomorrow and nostalgic for yesterday. Much like it was during my pregnancy, I can get teary at a sweet commercial, when in my childless past, I would have rolled my eyes or changed the channel. But that's me. I am an emotional, passionate person by nature. My better half is not. So when I watch him with our daughter now, it's a beautiful and surprising transformation.
He's a loving individual but was never emotive. Now, with our little panda, I hear it in his voice, I see it in his gaze. He is fully, thoroughly, utterly in love with his daughter. There is a sweetness and joy in him when he comes home from work and sees her; they look at each other and both faces light up. It brings me back to a time when I was a child and my dad would pick me up from the babysitter. We would walk home, hand-in-hand, and he would teach me this song:
My hubby is a brilliant, witty, caring individual. But in the words of Hermione, he has the "emotional range of a teaspoon". He's the first to admit that he is a little robotic, a little Vulcan-like in his demeanour. Unless the man is a few shots deep in a bottle of Johnnie Walker, he is quiet and reserved. If you can believe it, there's a term for this in Danish which he recently learned and immediately identified with. He is the very opposite of a loud, boastful, attention-grabbing person; an anti-Kanye, if you will.
Parenthood has not made him boastful. But it has made him emotional.
I myself get teary when I think of how far my little NICU preemie has come. Now that she's 8 months old and learning new things every day, I am simultaneously excited for tomorrow and nostalgic for yesterday. Much like it was during my pregnancy, I can get teary at a sweet commercial, when in my childless past, I would have rolled my eyes or changed the channel. But that's me. I am an emotional, passionate person by nature. My better half is not. So when I watch him with our daughter now, it's a beautiful and surprising transformation.
He's a loving individual but was never emotive. Now, with our little panda, I hear it in his voice, I see it in his gaze. He is fully, thoroughly, utterly in love with his daughter. There is a sweetness and joy in him when he comes home from work and sees her; they look at each other and both faces light up. It brings me back to a time when I was a child and my dad would pick me up from the babysitter. We would walk home, hand-in-hand, and he would teach me this song:
When daddy walks along the street and hurries home to me,
he takes the quickest longest steps that ever I did see.
But when I go to walk with him, he walks so differently.
He takes the slowest, shortest steps
So I can walk with him
Life is truly a cycle. That was my experience with my father, and my daughter will live her own with hers.
My husband has a very impressive music collection. While he listens to many of the same artists, he told me that he hears the songs differently now. With the perspective of a father, a parent, he is faced with life, growth, and mortality in a more meaningful way. One striking lyric from a father about his daughter says "she was never mine to keep" and without fail, it makes him teary.
They are indeed not ours to keep.
They are ours to teach, to nurture, and to love.
And then they are ours to let go.
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