Dear Riley:
Thanks for being such a good baby while I was holding you this morning. You are very chill. I like that in general in people but I especially appreciate it in you, as I was a little leery about taking you from your mom’s arms. You are so…uh, little. I really dig your eyebrows: do you wax? Because they are just so perfectly shaped. You are a whole little person; even though you were a couple weeks early, apparently you’re considered full term. I wish there was another phrase to describe you, other than “full term.” Fully alive? Fully a person? Fully a long-awaited dream come true? Hard to say.
Okay, so this has been a really hard week for a lot of people. There has been a terrible disaster in the South and a lot of people have lost their homes and everything they own. A lot of people have lost their lives. It’s crazy down there right now and some people are doing terrible things to one another. Pretty awful stuff. Tuesday night when I got home from the gym I was feeling pretty bad about all this, and I was eating my dinner and checking my email at the same time, which is a really unmannerly thing to do and in which I hope you will never emulate me. Unless all your housemates are gone and it’s just you at the table and you’re feeling pretty lonely, then it’s okay. Anyway, there was an email from your dad to your mom’s notify list…which I guess I’ll let her explain, and boy does she have some explaining to do about that. Your dad said that they’d gone to the hospital and were waiting for you, any minute. I was so excited to hear that. I’d been so unhappy all day, with all the terrible news about the hurricane, and then all of a sudden I kind of didn’t know what to do with myself. And then yesterday I got to see you for the first time, about two hours after you were born. I teared up a little, I’ll admit it.
A lot of my friends have had babies in the past couple of years, and several more are pregnant right now as we speak. I guess it’s just the age I’m at. Anyway, my friends who are pregnant and who have had kids are all far away from me. This sounds a little silly, but it’s been very hard for me to understand that these women I love so much are mothers, that we’re not all thirteen or twenty-three or whatever. I wasn’t with them when they got the news that they’d conceived, or when they started to show their bellies, or to go maternity clothes shopping. I just saw them with their babies on their hips one day, and I had to do a lot of very quick mental math, the kind of math where you look at your friend, and you think about everything you know about your friend, and it’s not that those things aren’t still true but, you know, you have to make room for this big other thing in your friend’s life that you absolutely cannot share with her, if you are not a mother yourself…and by “you,” of course, I mean “me.” It can be a shock, if you only see your friend once a year and the last time you saw her she was the way she’d always been. You have to adjust.
That didn’t happen to me with your mom, though. I met her about three years ago now; I wrote her the fangirliest fanmail that ever fanned, because I thought she was such a good writer. I forget exactly how it happened but somehow we agreed to meet for coffee and I swear, I primped and fretted more about going out for lunch with her more than I ever have for any date with a boy. We met in a parking lot and went to this weird mall restaurant and within five minutes we were talking and laughing like we’d known each other forever. We became friends without really having to become friends, you know…we just were friends. We’ve had a lot of lunches since then, had a lot of talks. Last summer she helped me mend a broken heart by having long talks and long walks with me and by taking me to IKEA in your father’s ridiculously large truck. She is very important to me, a good friend, a true friend.
So you can imagine how excited I was when she emailed me to tell me she was pregnant with you. It turns out she and your father and I had gone out to see naked ladies at a goth club the week before and the first thing I thought when she told me was “She was PREGNANT at the GOTH CLUB?” And yes she was. Your mom has really helped me see that you don’t have to lose someone when she becomes pregnant, becomes a parent. I was never really able to understand that with my other friends because I don’t see them enough to compare and contrast, if that makes sense. I got to see your mom’s belly grow month by month, and talk to her about what it was like to, uh, gestate you, and about becoming a parent, the way I haven’t been able to with some of my dear faraway friends. I really see what I missed, now. Seeing you yesterday and holding you today (dude, seriously, thanks again for being such a good boy…I don’t know what I would have done had you cried when I held you) was such an amazing thing. You can probably tell from my spacy writing that I don’t even know how to think about a brand new person, a brand new life. I haven’t ever had a chance before.
Anyway, it was really good to meet you. I’m really glad you have the parents you have: they are crazy and funny and kind and generous and all around awesome. They’re going to do the best they possibly can for you, and they love you so much. Like I said, this has been a hard week and I’ve thought a lot about how difficult it is to be fully human in disastrous times. I think, though, with all the people who love you, you have a good head start. Thanks for being a warm tiny perfect bright spot during a time of darkness. I’m so glad you’re here. I can’t wait to get to know you.
Love from Auntie Chiara