To my unborn child, with eager anticipation

To my unborn child, with eager anticipation;

I love you.

These many months waiting for you have been the best and most terrifying of our lives. Your mom and I shared tears of joy and disbelief when we found out you would be ours. Though we had hoped for you, longed for you, the thought that we would actually have the astonishing fortune of meeting you was beyond our comprehension. Soon, however, our first timid steps towards preparing ourselves for you became a strong, comfortable stride. As you have grown, we have grown. We have come to know you in some ineffable way – your patterns and moods, your shape and size – though you are still so much a mystery to us. At night, we dream of the person you will be, but we also know that these are but shadows; you will surpass every last one just by being you.

I have done everything I can to be ready to be your dad. I have read books and I have prayed, I have built furniture and painted walls and saved what I could for your future. I have watched and learned from my own father, the greatest man I know. I will always do my best to be the person you need me to be. But sometimes, dear one, I will fail. I will let you down. In your eyes I will be perfect, until I am not; and when that stained glass illusion of parental infallibility comes crashing down I promise I will show you that I love you in spite of my many faults. And I will always say I am sorry. If you don’t believe me, ask your mother.

Let me tell you about your mother. She is my light in the darkness, little one. She is everything that I could ever aspire to be. She is kind and boundlessly generous. She is passionate and devoted and steadfast and soft. She has more love in her soul than anyone I have ever met – though she loves you and I with all her heart, still she finds space and time to love everyone and everything who needs it of her. I have not met you yet, but I know that the best part of you will be that which comes from her. I am in awe of your mom. Perhaps one day you will have the awesome privilege of witnessing someone as strong as her carry a child within themselves for nine long months, nurturing them with their own force of life. Perhaps you will even do so yourself. But know forever that your mother withstood the world to bring you into it. She is mighty, and we are so lucky she belongs to us – to you and to me – and that we belong to her.

Speaking of belonging and belongings, we may not have the most nor the newest nor the finest of the things with which people fill their lives. We will not have the most money, nor the most stuff, but we will always have enough. And we will have the most fun, and the most joy, and the most love of anyone you will ever know – I promise you that. Our richness may never be in material things, but we are wealthy in love and in one another. We have all we need, we three. And if and when our family should continue to grow, we will have enough then too. Always.

We can’t wait to meet you, dearest one. We have prepared our hearts and our home for you. We have imagined all of the people you might be, and have no doubt come up short. We have picked names that we hope will fit you, this amazing person we have never met. But if we get it wrong, and the person you are inside does not match the name we have chosen for you, I hope we will show you with unconditional love that you can share those scary and precious truths of yourself with us. We can’t wait to discover by your side the person you are and the many people you will be.

You will have hopes and dreams, fears and sorrows; and we can’t wait to accomplish and celebrate them, overcome and defend you from them together. Hard as it may be for you to believe, your mom and I have hopes and dreams as well. Many of them we have realized together. Some we have not, and may never. Some we have put away in boxes in the back of a drawer to take out late at night and admire, like in the story book. But our deepest hope and truest dream has been you, and you are almost here. All we ever wanted to be was your mom and dad. Thank you for making our dreams come true.

And while we are on the business of dreams, here I must warn you. There will be forces, my darling, both outside of yourself and within, which aim to destroy your dreams. To belittle them. To prevent them from coming true. There are some who have questioned us, your mom and me, why we would want to bring a child into the world at times like these. They tell us there is too much sadness, too much anger, too much hatred in this world for a child. They tell us there will be no hope, no safety, no world for you to inherit. And that is to say nothing of the true villains inside each of us, who go by scary names like depression and anxiety and loneliness, who fight our dreams from the inside and tell us we can’t do it. And they will fight you too. They will make you feel as if someone has turned out all the lights and left you alone in the dark.

But baby, you have power within you to conquer them all. You are brilliant and wondrous and unstoppable. You have creativity and ingenuity and an infinite capacity for love. You have more potential than anyone who has ever lived. Every path to every possible future stretches before you, to choose as you will. You will know things that we never will, never could. You will teach us, each day, things that no one else knows. And most of all, precious and wild thing, you will never be alone. We will fight for you and beside you, all the days we walk this earth, to give you the chance to change the world in the ways you most certainly will. We will always be your light in the dark, as you will be ours.

I love you, baby. We love you.

Always.

Words on Words – February 2016

This idea, this commitment to read 50 books this year, has already paid dividends. The five books I read in February (books 5-9, overall) were more widely varied than I have read in a long time. Besides the sheer volume of reading I have set for myself, I wanted a few other things to come out of this project. One was to read books recommended by others, and the other was to read more widely than I would otherwise tend to. I have certainly carved a niche for myself in my reading over the last few years; this project has already introduced me to a few incredible books that I probably would not have even picked up otherwise. This project may be of no interest to anyone but myself, and perhaps these updates are merely self-serving, a reminder for myself in posterity. That is reason enough.

Here are the books I read in February, in order, and the words therein that stayed with me:

#5

“It was one of those moments, thankfully rare, when you can spot another person’s core needs, almost by accident – absolutely by accident since those needs are almost graphic when blatant, like seeing the musculature and tendon required to prop up hope.” – & Sons by David Gilbert

If I could have simply copied and pasted the entire manuscript of this novel as one quotation, I would have. & Sons (“Ampersand Sons”, not “And Sons”, for reasons which become apparent in the novel) is a testament to why writing is counted among the arts. Gilbert’s mastery of metaphor and his razor-sharp word choices often read more like poetry than prose. I consumed this book, as it consumed me. The story, about the relationships between and aging writer, his sons, and the family of his childhood friend, is as engrossing as I have read. It parts the curtain on the effect that success and genius can have on relationships, and the ways in which, rightly or wrongly, artists are seen as something more than human. The book is full of Important Questions and Deep Insights. But it was above all else the beauty of Gilbert’s writing, the care with which each sentence was crafted and fine-tuned, which completely took me in. The example above is just one of hundreds. How can you not become taken by a story which takes such a relatable moment, encountering another person in a moment of utter vulnerability, and makes it so visceral? “The musculature and tendon required to prop up hope” is one of the most strikingly beautiful phrases I have ever read. I could not recommend this book more highly.

#6

“Not everyone has to be the Chosen One. Not everyone has to be the guy who saves the world. Most people just have to live their lives the best they can, doing the things that are great for them, having great friends, trying to make their lives better, loving people properly. All the while knowing that the world makes no sense but trying to find a way to be happy anyway.” – The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness

As noted in last month’s round-up, I am a big fan of Patrick Ness. He has written some of the best contemporary Young Adult fiction out there, as well as the astonishingly beautiful The Crane Wife. This newest offering was fine, but in the context of the rest of his writing, it fell pretty flat for me. The premise is strong, and Ness uses a very entertaining device to deliver that premise effectively: the novel is about the lives of the secondary characters in teen science fiction stories, the ones to whom the crazy, world-saving events are NOT happening, and so each chapter is introduced as being about some incredible, fantastical event, and then proceeds to be about something else entirely. It is clever, it is fun. But the problem is that the story being told about these secondary characters is a flat one. The quotation above is the “aha” moment of the novel, and is a perfectly fine one as “aha ” moments go; most of us will never be extraordinary, and that is ok, so long as we do our ordinary things the best we can. But if that was the only thing you read in the entire book, I don’t feel like you would have gotten any less out of it than I did reading the whole thing.

#7

“You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair–the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.” – On Writing by Stephen King

On Writing has been on my list for a long time. A LONG time. King is, in my eyes, the greatest storyteller living today. A book on writing written by my favourite writer? Sounds too good to be true.

It was not. I am not treading any new ground by saying that On Writing is the quintessential book on the writer’s craft. It is accessible, honest, blunt, and inspirational. King approaches his role of professor with humility and grace, hoping to guide aspiring writers with his own successes and failures. This should be mandatory reading in every high school English class in the world. I have no doubt that my copy will become one of the most dog-eared books in my library as I thumb through to re-read flagged passages time and again, hoping to hone my own writing to something worth a reader’s time.

It is hard to pick one lesson which stood out among a master class, but the nugget above has certainly stuck with me. Write. Write what you know, and what you feel, and what you fear, and what you love. Do not try to isolate those things which are real from your writing. Writing cannot be done well if it is meaningless to you. If you take it lightly, so will your reader. Instead, harness all the meaning from your experience of life and let THAT be what drives your writing.

#8

“Violence harms the one who does it as much as the one who receives it. You could cut down a tree with an axe. The axe does violence to the tree, and escapes unharmed. Is that how you see it? Wood is soft compared to steel, but the sharp steel is dulled as it chops, and the sap of the tree will rust and pit it. The mighty axe does violence to the helpless tree, and is harmed by it. So it is with men, though the harm is in the spirit.” – The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan

It took me a while to become invested in the gargantuan world which Robert Jordan has created. The Wheel of Time is one of the most widely read fantasy series ever published, and its scope is absolutely massive. Once I got past the initial, overwhelming exposure to this world, I was able to enjoy the story for what it was: an epic battle between good and evil which makes no attempt to hide its derivations from Tolkien, but walks its own path in the end. I will certainly read more of the series (thought perhaps not all of it, as there are twelve books and they are all encyclopedic), but not this year. No time, you understand.

The problem with choosing a quotation from this book was that it was virtually unquotable. The excellence in this book is the storytelling and the world-building, not the writing. The writing, especially in comparison to a titan of the genre such as Tolkien, is actually fairly simplistic. The quotation above, about the ways in which we hurt ourselves and others, is the diamond in the rough; it is the one time the author steps back to wax philosophical and make a larger observation about humanity. And it is a darn good observation, at that.

#9

“Make sure you tell the whole story.” – The Illegal by Lawrence Hill

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation holds the “Canada Reads” competition each year, celebrating excellence in Canadian writing through exploration of a certain theme. This year’s theme is “starting over,” and The Illegal is among the 5 finalists. It is the story of a marathon runner living as an illegal immigrant in the fictional nation of Freedom State. The novel is as timely as they come, with so much global attention focused on refugees and immigration issues. It was not a long read, nor quite in the same stratus as Hill’s hugely acclaimed The Book of Negroes, but it was a distinctly Canadian look at its central topic.

Like The Eye of the World, however, it was not an overly quotable novel. The line I chose comes from the end of the book, and deals with the standards to which we should hold media outlets and governments when presenting issues of national importance. In North America in particular, cultural consciousness is informed and inflamed by partisan media representing special interests instead of truth. The message of the novel is that every issue is complex, every story contains multitudes. Right and wrong, good and bad are rarely as simple as all that. Our duty as providers and consumers of media is to make sure that stories are told truthfully and responsibly.

*****

Two months down. Ten months and 41 books to go! Check back every month for more Words on Words and other thoughts on An Awfully Big Adventure!