I sat last night thinking about what I wanted to say today. I sit here now typing words, knowing that there is no chance I will find the right ones. Still, I have to try.
There are no words. There are in-between words. There are smiles. There are laughs. There are sighs and shrugs and head shakes and winces. There is a welling up of emotion. There is, of course, because it's me, a chilling sense of foreboding if the unthinkable were to happen. But the words do not exist, have not been invented to describe, to express, to reveal the type of father my husband is to my daughter.
I knew it from the moment we started talking about children. He wanted so badly to be a great father, the kind he never had, the kind I never had, the kind neither of us had ever really seen.
My dad and my stepdad, I can truly say at this point in my life, did the best they could with what they were given. They were never evil, never absentee, never "bad" fathers. They were young and stupid when they had kids, and made the best of the chaos of parenthood.
We were not young, and a little less stupid, when we decided to have Celaya, and two years later, when we finally had her, we were even less young, and hopefully even less stupid.
My husband works at being a father. He tries to teach her letters and numbers, colors and shapes. He plays in the sand and the dirt. He makes the dinosaurs attack the village and throws balls around (usually avoiding breaking things). He dances with my daughter, and he even dances with her giant panda bear when she insists. He plays with her and snuggles her and dreams big dreams for her.
And that's just the fun stuff. Three nights a week my daughter's father comes home from work and usually doesn't even have a chance to change out of his work clothes until after he puts her to bed hours later. He engages with her as she leaps into his arms. He feeds her, bathes her, reads her stories, rocks her gently and sings her songs when she implores him to "snuggle for a minute," and he puts her to bed. He is as much a father as I am a mother. And even today in this progressive society of equality between men and women, I think that is rare.
Sure, he makes mistakes.
He almost drowned her in her own breast milk once.
I was at work, he was feeding her a bottle of breast milk, and, to clear her nasal passages that were stuffed up from a cold, he gave her a dropper of breast milk in her nose, as we had been doing for a few days. Except he couldn't find the usual tiny dropper we had been using, so he improvised with a dropper easily five times as large.
You can imagine the rest.
In many ways he is a typical dad.
I come home from working all day on Saturdays to find Celaya in an orange top, lime green leggings, purple socks, an off center top ponytail, two crooked ponytails in the back, or just her crazy hair free flying around a dirty face, with paint on her toes and paint on my walls. Toys are everywhere, the music is too loud, and the kitchen is a mess, because, "man, she's a lot of work!"
And that's what keeps me from wondering if this is all just a dream, too good to be true, too perfect to be real.
Nope. It's real. My husband's old hiking backpack stocked (by him) and ready (just in case they decide to take off somewhere) with diapers, wipes, a few toys, a bag of fruit snacks, and an extra outfit is there to prove it.
I love him more now as the father of my daughter than I ever did as merely the man I fell in love with and chose to spend the rest of my life with.
I love him because I truly believe he strives to be a better husband to me because he know his daughter will grow up to choose a man like her father, and he wants her treated the way he treats me.
I love him because he will fight for her in a way I would never think to.
I love him because he will teach her things I would never be able to.
I love him because he is the knight who will slay her dragons. He is the warrior who will battle her demons. He is the astronaut who will help her reach the stars. He is the light that will chase away the dark for her. He is. He is. He is.
And finally, and most importantly, I love him so much, as much as I do, because I see how much she loves him, and just how much she does. He has become such an irreplaceable part of my world because he is such an irreplaceable part of hers.
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