Gus. Gus buddy. Sweet guy. Spoon.
I haven’t often used this website to talk to you directly. Or really, what I’m doing: talk to the future you directly, the you that isn’t three, the you that will be so computer savvy that in 2018 you’ll have no problems finding, to your mortification, your father’s sappy outflow on his little-read blog, ten long years since. But mortification is what families are for.
There’s a lot going on in our family right now. Your baby brother isn’t born yet, but will be in three weeks. He still doesn’t have a real name so we call him as “Cheese,” which is short for “Mac and Cheese,” which is what you named him a couple of months ago. I think he may always wonder, as he grows up, why everyone in his family calls him Cheese, the same way I wondered growing up how it was that I was called Moobles McGobstopper. The same way your buddies in high school may wonder why I call you Spoon. Spoon.
You’re called Spoon because I love you.
We’re all in a dither, a tizzy, a kind of constant spasm of stress, trying to finish up work projects and home projects before Cheese emerges and we descend into a temporary hell of sleep deprivation and spit-up. Actually, the spit-up isn’t so bad. But we all need sleep.
But this time, unlike after you were born, we’re pretty sure that we’ll survive. After you were born, your mother and I existed in a kind of constant low-level terror — terror that you would just stop breathing, or stop eating. Or that you would, in your pre-walking stage, suddenly sprint into heavy traffic. Now we think that maybe parenthood is a little more predictable, and we’re a little more confident.
And that confidence comes mainly because you’ve turned out really, really well. You’re still alive, and you’re funny, and gentle, and you make up long stories that have no punctuation but thirty repetitions of “and then.” And you’re easy on the eyes.
A few days ago, we went to one of what at this point is once-weekly midwife visits, and were surprised to see, on the midwives’ big bulletin board of baby pictures, a picture of you, just a couple of weeks old. Forgive me, little buddy, but you didn’t look too smart back then. But that picture took me back to when your mama and I were first alone with you, in a dark hospital room in the middle of the night, after days of labor, induced and not. (Please understand, when you are in your early teens and your mama tells you she deserves better after being in labor with you for ten days, she’s exaggerating. It was only four.) But as I sat in a chair holding you, with you tiny and so tightly swaddled I couldn’t even make out your individual limbs, I wept. I wept out of fear, and anxiety, and desperation, and out of the certain knowledge that I would give my life for yours, but not even sure that I could keep you breathing from one minute to the next.
Luckily, you’ve taken care of the breathing. For my part, I haven’t dropped you. Not once.
But the reason I’m writing this is because just a few days ago, I was weeping again, this time for a different reason. You see, the past few years have been a very scary, unhappy time, for reasons that I know we have kept you safe from. In a sense, your first three years have been like a paradisical tropical island, free from stress or want. We’re going to keep it that way for you for as long as we can.
But for us big people, bad things have been happening. Things haven’t been going the way we wanted. People we are supposed to trust have been doing things that we knew were wrong. And lots of us have felt like maybe things weren’t going to get better. That they were just going to keep getting worse. And that if things got worse, we wouldn’t be able to keep people like you, and little Cheese, safe.
That brings me to a few days ago.
You see, today is Friday, November seventh. A few days ago it was the first Tuesday in November, which here in the United States is Election Day. And on Tuesday, I was almost transcendentally stressed. I was terrified. I was terrified for you, and for me, and your mama, and our whole country, and the world. I was afraid that something bad would happen.
But it didn’t.
On Tuesday, a man named Barack Obama was elected the next president. People, including me, probably think this matters more than it should. And he may turn out to be a bad president. He may be bad at his job, or bad things may happen while he’s in charge, and if bad things happen he’ll take the blame, whether they’re his fault or not, because that’s part of the job, and he wanted the job.
But what we know about Barack Obama is that he’s smart, and thoughtful, and deliberate. He thinks about why things are the way they are, and about how they should be, and how to make them that way. He wants to make other people care more. He’s not the life of the party, but he makes jokes, and laughs at jokes, and smiles when he’s happy. He loves his wife. He loves his two daughters, who aren’t much older than you.
For all these reasons, Barack Obama made me think, over the course of the past several months, that he would be a good president. As I wrote a few lines ago, these have been a hard few years. The people who have been running our country have seemed to many of us to not be thoughtful, or deliberate, or much concerned with making things good. They have seemed, to me, to be pretty bad people. The people running against Barack Obama seemed to me to be more bad people, or at least they seemed to be people with the same bad qualities as the people who have been in charge for so long. And I was afraid, all day Tuesday, that because these bad people had been in charge for so long (since years before you were born) that something bad would happen on Tuesday.
But it didn’t. Barack Obama was supposed to win the election, and he did. And it didn’t hit me until his opponent, a man named John McCain, was giving a speech in which he conceded that he had lost, and Obama had won. And it made me think that everything had a chance of being ok. That we could work out the problems that we had caused, and fix things we had broken. You were asleep upstairs in your crib, which you still prefer to your big-boy bed, and your mama and I were sitting on the couch, and I had my arm around her. I found myself weeping –with relief, with hope — as John McCain talked. Then today I saw this picture, taken at that same moment. And I wept again. I want things to be good for you.
Spoon. You are my Spoon.
(David Katz/Obama for America)
