It started earlier tonight when I decided to look for some old photos of myself and others from my distant past. There was a big Rubbermaid storage box filled with old photos and keepsakes in a closet, I thought. So I rooted it out and decided to spend some time looking through the photos for the best ones to scan and share on Facebook. They seemed to cover a huge span of time… everything from my mother’s early childhood in the late 1940s to just a few Christmases ago. And some were of me – a lot of me and my sister as kids. I pulled out the ones I liked of myself. (My sister can scan her own photos someday if she wants to.)
Then I found something I wasn’t expecting to see. It was a baby book that, by the age of 31, I never knew I had. As I opened it up, I saw a black and white picture of a newborn baby boy. My name was written lovingly underneath it, with the date – September 19, 1980 – below that.
8 lb 7 ounces, 21 inches
I was shocked. My parents had never told me I had a baby book. They’d never pulled it out to show me as a kid or to embarrass any girlfriends as a teenager. Why was I finding this on my own only now? I still don’t have an answer for that.
I continued to leaf through it. There weren’t any more photos of me. Those were all to be found in the piles of photos I’d already gone through. This was less of a photo album and more of a book of artifacts and keepsakes. A book of records my mom kept and jotted down as she began to raise me; a book of “firsts” and “favorites”. It was all very sweet. I read through it all, imagining what my mother – and my father, too – must have been feeling as they kept jotting down little notes about how baby Michael was developing; chronicling my experiences for me.
Then the book ended. I closed it, looked through a few more old photos. And then I came across a very non-descript light blue file folder. Inside were what appeared to be old office papers, filled from top to bottom with scribbled handwriting. My attention wasn't immediately drawn to that group of papers – I leafed through a few more on the other side of the folder. But soon, I looked again and saw it was my mother’s handwriting. And I saw the words, “Dear Baby,” adorning the beginning of the first paragraph. Then I saw the date that had been scrawled just to the left of that – “1/28/80”; less than eight months before my birth.
This document was a journal, written by my mother, directly to me: her as-of-yet unborn child. She was chronicling her experiences in a letter to me, and yet I had never known this letter existed until now (– literally, just a few hours ago as I write this). She first tells of how she came to find out that she was pregnant – that she’d been feeling symptoms of sickness and headaches. She’d been describing these symptoms over the phone to her cousin Joan, with whom she was very close. Joan already had birthed three children by this time (two more would come from her later on) and she urged my mother to go to a doctor to get a blood test. She was writing this only a short time after receiving the results of that blood test over the phone. This was the first she had ever known of my existence, and it is the first direct record I’ve ever seen of it. It was like reading the moment of my very conception. (Not literally, of course – I would choose not to read that.)
She went on to write more entries. Later dates – 2/11/80, 5/19/80 – and she would scribble, in ever-decreasing legibility, about her excitement for my arrival, her fears about how she and my father would afford to raise me, fears about the contentment and serenity of the environment in which I’d be raised, but mostly that she just couldn't wait to meet me. She wrote again on 9/12/80 – my due date. She’d been on maternity leave for two and a half months now and was growing as restless as she was large. She explained that she was uncomfortable a lot of the time, but was, more than anything else, just eager and “anxious” to meet me and to hold me in her arms. I was born one week later.
The next and final entry is dated 12/4/80. Her handwriting is much clearer now.
And that’s it. That’s all she wrote for me. I was already sniffling and wiping tears off my cheek at this point, but then I leafed through the other pages on the other side of the folder. I found more hand-written letters, this time on lined paper. It was my father’s handwriting.
Dear Michael,
This is my first entry since you were born. Tomorrow you will be eleven weeks old, two and a half months. You are even more wonderful than I ever dreamed. Since the moment you were born, you’ve had a calm and happy disposition. You’ve brought me more happiness than I have ever known in my life. You’re an unusually good baby. You seldom cry but smile a lot and sleep the majority of the time. Your birth was a marvelous experience, and since that time, you’ve been a joy. Your Dad tells me at least three times a day how much he loves you. He spends a great deal of time playing with you and taking care of you. Ceci & Eric [half-siblings] also take care of you and play with you. They think you’re pretty special and already I can see that you feel the same about them. Grandma McCarthy is just overjoyed with you and thinks you’re so special. Grandma Wood just met you for the first time about ten days ago and she is really enjoying you.
And that’s it. That’s all she wrote for me. I was already sniffling and wiping tears off my cheek at this point, but then I leafed through the other pages on the other side of the folder. I found more hand-written letters, this time on lined paper. It was my father’s handwriting.
“To my child,” it began. Oh, great! I thought, as I rolled my eyes and felt an even bigger lump hit my throat.
My father went on to explain that he was writing this letter on the BART train, on his way home from his office in San Francisco at 11:22 AM because he’d received word that my mother’s water had broken. He wrote that he wanted to tell me exactly what he was feeling as this time. I imagined my 45-year old father, tall and slender, in his suit and tie – probably in a mid-70s style, striving hard to avoid the evolution of fashion – his tightly combed brown hair and his neatly-sculpted mustache – too young yet to need his glasses – bouncing and swaying gently as the railway train carried him East toward my mother at 60 miles per hour. His emotions came through his words and in his handwriting, and I could feel the mixture of excitement and fear in him. He explained that he wished he could give me a more natural experience upon entering this world – he almost seemed to be apologizing as he described the bright fluorescent lights, the cold scales and instruments and the busy shuffling of people I’d be exposed to upon my arrival. How he wished he could offer my mother and me a home delivery, surrounded only by loved ones and a single nurse or doctor, or maybe a quiet, solitary experience – just my mother and me. He tried to explain, again, apologetically, to an unborn, unknowing blank slate of a baby why it would have to be subjected to these modern discomforts – that it was a trade-off for the awe-inspiring stimuli of our modern society. He expressed his desire that he will be able to teach me to appreciate a balance with nature and with society… someday.
He also explained that he had spent a lot of time rubbing what he believed to be my back and my shoulders as best as he could figure from outside the womb and that I’d responded to his touch by calming my movements or my kicks. He told me he couldn’t wait to rub my back in person – directly – and that he hoped I would develop to know the difference between a maternal touch and a paternal touch. I don’t know exactly what he meant, but I know he wrote it with so much love in his heart that maybe it was causing him to not make sense.
His train arrived, and he had to catch a bus to the hospital. And with the end of that entry, his life without me in it came to an end.
The next entry was written about 13 hours later. My father went on to tell me all the details of my delivery; that it was smoother than even he – who’d had four children with his previous wife – had expected. That I was the first of his children whose birth he’d been allowed to witness first-hand, and how my head changed shape right before his eyes as I was squeezed out of my mother and reformed into a bulbous little cranium on a tiny body, that I’d been born bigger than any of his previous children and that I was instantly mesmerized by my new surroundings. He explained that, although he and my mother wished she could hold me right away, bare skin to bare skin, the nurses insisted that I be wrapped in a blanket first. But that when my mother did hold me, I was instantly secure and calm and that he persuaded the nurses to let us be alone for another hour or so before tending to their various duties with me.
For the first time ever, he wrote down parts of the story he would go on to tell me countless times in my life – that I’d caused him to miss the final episode of the miniseries, Shogun, on ABC, but that he was glad to have spent the time with me, instead, (the box set on DVD would make for a nice gift years later,) and how my mother had made a specific request for dinner that night; a cheeseburger and a milkshake, which he was happy to visit the nearest Burger King to obtain for her. He thanked me for arriving early enough in the evening (at 8:15 PM) to allow him to spend time with me, make the requisite phone calls to friends and family, and get home in time to see his other teenage kids and go to bed himself at a reasonable hour.
“I love you, my son – very much.” He closed. “Welcome to our home.”
As I closed the folder, I slowly began racing back to the present after having spent a very strange time in a part of my own past I feel like I’d never actually experienced – my birth. I saw myself as a newborn through both my mother’s and my father’s eyes, and experienced our introduction to each other through them. It was so strange, how it seemed to be written to me – not 5-year old me, or 20-year old me, but me right now – today – from people whom I’ve come to know quite well, but not in this form… never this young. My parents from my distant past were talking directly, in these letters, to me in their future. I’m still coming down from this strange trip. I actually felt, as I read all these words, like I was there in the delivery room with them, watching myself being born. And I felt the excitement and the overwhelming love they all had for me in their hearts at that moment. The ink from their pens from that very day was right here under my fingertips. Their words and their handwritings were not a conduit, but were the very scene itself. And, for all these years, I’d never known these letters existed.
My sobbing was unstoppable. I cried hard into my hands, struggling and choking the sounds back because I didn’t want to hear them. But they kept coming, and my logical brain wanted to know why. Was I sad about this? Were these tears of joy? Of pain? Relief? The only conclusion I believe I could come to was… yes! I was feeling all of these things.
But why should I feel sadness and pain in the light of these letters that are testament to my parents’ love for me? Because now, as I read them, my parents are also 31 years older. Their health is beginning to fail. They’re both working so hard far-past their retirement age just to keep a roof over their heads and food on their tables. And I do not know that I will ever be able to introduce them to their grandchildren, should I ever be able to give them any. I am bitterly sad that life should provide opportunities for such amazing moments of joy and pure love, only to have them slowly and painfully taken away from us in the end. I was crying because a part of me was all too aware of the fragility of it all, and it was not beautiful in its fleetingness. It was tragic and heart-wrenching.
And yet, it was joy and bliss and relief for my soul as I read these messages that so patiently waited in an over-sized shoebox for me to discover them and to ingest them at the exact moment that fate would decide I needed and could appreciate them the most.
And yet I also felt a depressing feeling – almost shameful – that I have, in m 31 years, come nowhere near to fulfilling the potential that my mother and father wrote so lovingly that they hoped I would. I felt that I was a failure at the game of life; that, a midst this economic and social depression, I’m a victim of circumstances only to a certain degree, and that my current sorry state of affairs is so much of my own doing that I have undoubtedly disappointed these lovely, hopeful and caring young people who had just reached out through time to speak to me. I had let them down. And even at two o’clock in the morning, as my 76-year old father surely lies sleeping soundly next to my 64-year old mother in their bed, not thinking of me at all, I am – concretely – a great disappointment to them still.
But then another thought occurred to me. Perhaps my young parents – the hopeful, happy souls who wrote the letters – had reached me at this point in time for another reason. I felt that I could not let this strange trip into a pseudo-time-warp of undying love and devotion to the very idea of myself that my parents gave to me be a negative and disheartening experience; that some good must come of it now.
And that’s when I saw myself – perhaps only for a moment, but a moment long enough – through their eyes. Perhaps I wasn’t the total disappointment I thought I was. Perhaps, although not in the position in my life that I wish I were, I was not anywhere near the son that they might have feared I would become. To be fair, those young parents would probably be thrilled to know that their son would not become a drug addict, or an alcoholic. He would never be arrested or spend any time in jail. He would never be seriously injured in a car crash or while playing a sport. He is not un-driven or un-motivated. He is not without passion and desire. That he is, in fact, creative, witty, intelligent, and musically inclined. That he enjoys writing, and drawing, and telling stories. That he loves children and that they, inevitably, always seem to love him. That, despite the problems he feels he does have, there are many problems of the world that he does not and will not ever have. And perhaps they would be pleased to know that he read their letters. And that he heard their words. And that, to know more about who he is and where he’s come from, he needed them more than ever… on this very night.
