I was having a conversation at a barbecue with a slightly drunken Iranian yesterday. The gist of what he was saying seemed to be about parenthood, how it's not just about raising your children and seeing them develop. It's also the mirror of that, seeing how they develop you and what comes out. It was an interesting point and probably very true. Some of the profundity may have been lost behind a fug of booze, though, the conversation was a fairly incoherent medley of politics, psychology and nationalism.
Also at the barbecue yesterday were two other babies, one only a few weeks old, one a couple of months behind F. V and I both swore the youngest one was much smaller than F had ever been. It wasn't true, F turned out to have been shorter and lighter at birth. It's just impossible to imagine her as a little red rag of a person like that any more, all tiny and floppy and crinkly. Not now she's mastering flirting and chatting, or has decided that other people sneezing is the funniest thing ever.
F has done a heap of developing. Even a video from two months back, showing her trying food in a spoon for the first time, shows a totally different little girl. She can sit upright unaided now. Sometimes, anyway, if you prop her up right. She hasn't quite worked out that leaning forward will upset the balance. But yesterday was the first time she did it without the set up, she grabbed the bar across her pram and then stayed there for about fifteen minutes, happily doing pull-ups and gnawing on the fabric cover.
She plays piano with me and enjoys singing along. She can just about get her nap back in her mouth without our help. She can eat a wafer biscuit, biting out soggy mouthfuls with her two baby teeth. She can stand upright if she's got something to hold on to. All this is new in the last week or so alone.
And physical achievements like these don't really get across the way that she's appearing as a person now, her character emerging from the confused crying and constant sleeping she did as a newborn. As though a little more of her brain wakes up every time she does. She's interested in things, she asks to be taken to stuff that's caught her eye. She sulks if she's not allowed to, e.g. chew through daddy's earphone cables.
After the first bloom of interest in a project has waned, I'm frequently guilty of moving on to something else and never finishing what I started. This is a trait supposedly common in people born in a Dragon Chinese zodiac year, as I was. Knowing that has often made an excellent excuse, of course, astrology is usually a self-fulfilling prophesy I find. Scorpios are brooding, passionate and secretive? Excellent! I'll maintain those character flaws instead of working on them, I'm supposed to be that way.
I mention this as an excuse for why I haven't written anything on this blog for two weeks. Being a father gets exhausting and difficult. It is easy to get tired, and I have been feeling that lately. It isn't that F's not doing as much funny or sweet stuff or being less inspirational, just that I haven't been able to muster the energy to write about it.
F is a different project every day, in a sense. I don't think of her as a project, a job or a chore, despite her occasional efforts to convince me otherwise. It would be impossible to lose interest, she's just too interesting.
The first time she tries something out, it doesn't usually work. The wafer biscuits, for example - watching her trying to get her hands to do what she wants is fascinating. You know the intent is there, but it's like seeing a first time crane operator on their first demolition job The things that fall down and break aren't quite the ones she's aiming for yet. But she doesn't give up, she keeps trying. And she's also very good at asking for help, often quite vocally.
When I started writing this particular entry, it was a bit of an uphill struggle. The tiredness I'm still feeling, the suspicion I'm writing to a rather empty gallery, the typical writer's niggle of 'what am I writing all this for?' - all there in spades today. Luckily F woke up and wanted to play. We played Scrabble. F loves playing Scrabble, it's one of her favourites. I hold her up to the box and she takes the title printed on the side as an instruction as she tries to pull it out of the stack of other board games.
Half an hour of that has restored my faith in the world. That's why I like being a dad so much. F can be a better, more developed person every time she wakes up. She's very inspirational that way. She makes me feel I might be able to do it too.
I'd prefer to develop into a person less likely to get so over-excited about a bag of scrabble letters they start crying, mind you. Let's face it, though, I'm a wuss. That would probably be a step up.
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