Milestone
I know you won't remember any of this. But will I?
I’m terrified I’ll forget the early days. That precious period when we measured your age in weeks and your height in inches. When every little thing you did was cause for a celebration, a milestone: you raised your head – milestone! You looked at a bird – milestone! You farted with more bass than last time – MILESTONE!! The first time I made you smile, it was like I had decoded an ancient dial puzzle. Your mom and I waited nine months just to see your face, and then you mad-dogged us for weeks. When you finally turned your eyes into crescents and curled your lips to giggle between your bare gums, I melted. I told myself I would mark the date. I never did.
Three years later, there’s so much I take for granted. I even get irritated by your laughter sometimes (especially when you’re bellyflopping onto me from a piece of furniture you weren’t supposed to climb). I’ve gotten used to your presence. I’ve become obsessed with your future. I’ve grown weary that our past will fade away.
Remember when you used to lay your entire body on my chest while I counted your breaths? The hours oozed by like honey down the side of its jar. We savored each moment, didn’t we? But things move so much faster these days. I look at you and I see a timelapse. I feel like I’m always trying to get you to the next thing, the next place, the next level. I’ve been so focused on your development, but maybe I’m the one who’s changed.
When I ask other, more seasoned parents about their first weeks, months, and years, they shrug and say, “I don’t even remember that anymore.” One said, “I must’ve wiped it from my mind.” I shudder to imagine all our treasured moments finding this fate. That hike where you chased a flock of seagulls trying to feed them daisy petals. Wiped. How you switch your syllables, calling watermelon “waterlemon” and toothpaste “pootaste.” Wiped. The way you imitate a cat when you’re feeling cuddly, and meow while burying your face into my armpit until you fall into a slumber. All of it, wiped.
This hypercapitalistic world beckons me to turn fatherhood into a bigger project than it already is. The internet is teeming with blogs, podcasts, and dadfluencers eager to show me how to package this experience into something that can be branded, project-managed, marketed, and monetized. As an artist, I was already speaking of my practice in the language of parenthood long before you came around: calling my projects my “babies,” cultivating a “body” of work, hoping its impact will be “generational.” I began my creative journey as a teenage spoken word poet, scribbling my anxieties and excitements, and reciting them onstage as a form of self-discovery. I used my art to come to terms with who I was as a young man, an Asian American, a person trying to contribute to a rapid world. I learned to harness my most personal insights into 3-minute performance pieces, receive scores for them at competitions, market them for gigs and tours, publish them in books and records. I’ve made a career out of hustling my life experiences.
When you were born, I was so resistant to doing that with our new relationship that I muzzled myself for the first few months, refusing to write, and to simply be. But I can now tell you that I cannot be if I’m not creating. I can also tell you that, despite the gigabyes of photos and videos my phone has accumulated, I still wonder where all our moments have gone. I’ve wrestled with whether to spend time capturing a moment at the expense of missing another. When I finally have time to duck out and write, all I can think about is how much I want to be with you. Child, you are my inspiration, and you are my distraction.
When you turned two, I scrounged around my files, google docs, texts-to-self, and other places where I had managed to jot down a handful of snapshots of early life with you. I printed them for around 50 copies of a zine that I passed along to friends. I had reached peak dad – and also a new peak as a writer.
I don’t have any parenting tips for anyone. I don’t know what writing about this experience more regularly will lead to – if you’ll come across it when you’re older, and if you’ll find it moving or cringe. I don’t know if I’ll find it moving or cringe. I just know that I’m a better person when I’m writing, and I want to be that better person for you.
Todays’ question for the people:
What do you do to preserve your cherished memories?
I appreciate how well you've captured the struggle as a parent and artist to savor the time, but also capture it for later, and the pull towards making it all into some sort of "project" which might accomplish both or just pull you out of it. You'll find a way, and you might just forget most of it. Children are the most precious ephemeral art.