on your second birthday

so i was halfway done with this letter and the browser crashed on me. you turned two today baby, and i wanted to write something. i know it is just as likely that these internetz and blogs will have gone away by the time you are really reading as that any scrap of paper that i write on will fail to survive our adventures, but maybe?

you probably know that we really belive that you chose us twice. concieved in the same moon tweo years in a row. thank you, of course choosing mama was just plain smart.

i love living and traveling with you. it’s amazing all the things yopu have changed, and the things you haven’t that everyone was sure you would. we didn’t settle down and settle in, you made travelling better. we didn’t get respectable and stable, we got a little pirate to adventure with.

and i am amused and pissed when folks tell me in the street that you can’t be my kid because you look egyptian, and i was amused and pissed in mexico when they stopped me to tell me that you were not mine because you were mexican. yes, you pass well in those cursed/ blessed places that are the crossraods and mixing grounds of humanity, because you are from one. you are the kid of a waspy northerner and a southern black woman from the us. and we love each other through the bullshit that our histories carry, and the beauty. and we love each other through our own strengths and weeknesses. and we love you more.

so when you stop every kid yopu pass in the street to start a dance party i beem, and your mama is no end of proud when you sit and write letters to her while you sing your abc’s and then deliver them to her half asleep in the morning.

i worry sometimes about the faith i am passing to you. in my earlier daydreams my kid would be baptized by now and instead i wonder at times if i should claim my baptism, but i’ll support you as you find your way. i will be thrilled if you found the beauty and power in christianity to live as fully you fully looving and struggling. and i will be thrilled if you pass it by to find your own way to strength and connection. in the meantime we will wander churches and light candles together, but duck out before the preaching. i will keep teaching you to call mary in all her incarnations mama, and you will keep pointing to the icons of jesus in her lap and calling him aza. why not you come from bethlehem too and are chosen of god/dess.

it’s scary that i have regrets already as a papa. the times i have been too wrapped in my own head to be as tuned in as i should are not a few, and at least one of them hurt you bad. all praise tht your leg healed well and that contrary to the church-lady curses you don’t walk with a limp.

mostly baby, figure out you, and mama and i have your back. and if something about who we tell you you are dosn’t fit, tell us and we’ll knock it off and tell the world that you are who you say you are.

in the morning when you wake up and crawl into bed asking for juice and deciding what highlighter tattoos you will sport for the day, i will be my cranky morning self, and so glad that you are the one bringing that craziness into my world.

two years down and still kickin’ ass. aza