Playing in the Sandbox with My Daughter

Dubsie dearest. Photo by Vita Images.

Because the years are short, because the Year is New, because my daughter Dubsie is 20 months old and growing and morphing faster than a busy father can take note, I resolve to blog about her, every week, during the year of two thousand fifteen.

We climbed the stairs last night without my first turning on the light. Dubsie enjoys being carried up the stairs, a strong forearm under her ample rump. As we reached the landing, her voice came out of the blackness and surprised me. “So dark!”

So dark? Wait, when did she learn that the word “dark” meant the absence of light? When did she learn to precede it with the the adverb “so” in order to form a comment on said darkness? Isn’t this girl who was drooling all over herself, like, yesterday?

These discoveries, hers and mine, are what I want to capture here. I am minding the admonishment that I heard from seemingly every parent before Dubsie was born: that it goes by so fast and you need to capture the tics and foibles of a developing personality before the new ones arrive and gallop them flat in your memory.

Discoveries, yes, but also the tears, the messes, the frustrations, the things that will be broken.

“The Sandbox” is what I’m calling it. Children have sandboxes so they can create and reshape and epically destroy with nothing in the way of consequences. Adults also need such sandboxes. My sandbox has to do with noticing life and writing about it in ways I wouldn’t usually. For example, I never have started a sentence the way I started the opening sentence of this post, with a series of repeated “becauses.” Writers care about stuff like that.

Dubsie and I are both groping along in the dark, as I learn to be a father and she learns to be a person. May this journal be the flashlight that reveals, if not where we’re going, than at least where we’ve been.