MY EVERYTHING

It’s funny you don’t realize you’re lost until you’ve been found. It’s funny you don’t realize something is missing until the void is filled. It’s funny how you think you know yourself inside out only to discover you don’t at all. It’s funny that the seriousness of it all isn’t really that funny. Parenting. Fatherhood. They warned me having a child would change everything. Had I known they were right, I would have changed everything to have a child.

It’s insane to think how quickly I fell in love with her. I thought I loved her before she was born, when her mother and I discussed furniture arrangement in her nursery, when I watched her move from within my wife’s growing belly, when I heard her heartbeat through a speaker inside a cold doctor’s office, when I saw her face and limbs moving on a screen. I thought I loved her when I found out about her, but that wasn’t love. It wasn’t love until I felt the weight of her in my arms.

It’s unbelievable how much my heart grew that day. There was a hole in my chest, in my life, that I somehow lived my days oblivious to until she filled it. She consumed me. She is apparently what I had been looking for without being aware of the search. She is every reason for every thing and it seems the day she was born was the day I was born again, too. She’s the salt in my tears and the volume in my laugh. She’s the light of my morning and the darkness of my night. She’s everything.

It’s interesting to think of life before her and life after because there’s a hard line in the sand drawn by her with a version of myself standing on either side. Her mother is and has always been the clear love of my life, but my daughter is the love of my existence. I intentionally sought the love of her mother, putting forth effort and tripping over mistakes, wishing and hoping for her love in return. With my daughter, it was immediate and unconditional and ever growing and something I never knew I was capable of giving let alone receiving.

It’s all because of her. Every paragraph of this entry has started with “it’s” because it’s true; it’s all because of her. Every decision, every moment, every time I open my eyes and close them again, every time I apologize for not being everything to her that she is to me, every second guess, every epiphany, every lesson learned and taught, every time I fall short, every time I don’t, every thing everywhere every time is all because of her. It’s true. It is. She’s everything. Every single thing.