The discussion in the car this morning, pumpkling, was centred around what might happen to you that we fear. What things your mother and I are most worried about in the first days and months that we have you home.
I’m sure you’ll hear tales and see photos of the time that we had seven puppies in our house for two months. Eight weeks of having nine dogs taught us a few things about the relative resilience of small beings, but I’m fairly sure that the nonchalance with which I was slinging puppies around by the time they were five or six weeks old won’t necessarily come quite so easily to me with you.
Talking in the car this morning, I said that my greatest fear is that I will drop you. That one day you’ll wriggle just at the wrong moment, in the wrong direction and fall right out of my hands. My heart is pumping faster just typing these words, punkling, and there’s at least some small part of my dadbrain that’s telling me I could catch you again.
A few words about the dadbrain here. The dadbrain is, I believe, a small growth, a tumor if you will, on the surface of my brain that is affecting the way I think and speak. It makes my mouth say things like “Well it serves you right, you shouldn’t have been running.”, and “Turn that bloody music down.”. It is also convinced, for some reason, that I am a finely honed physical specimen, capable of great feats of strength as well as cunning displays of skill. Neither of these things, of course, have even the tiniest relationship to the truth.
My dadbrain also injects sizable amounts of hormones directly into my cerebral cortex whenever I am watching some kind of movie or television show in which there is a father/child relationship. At the end of ‘Zoolander’, when John Voight announces to the whole bar that Derek is his son, a massive dose of something or other made tears well up in my eyes.
Not that I was crying, mind you. I had something in my eye.
Love you.
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