Late-night reflections following the birth of my daughter
Wednesday, May 31, 1am
Identity is a funny thing. I live a life of enormous privilege. I have the right race, the right gender, the right passport, the right talents, the right upbringing to cultivate the right mix of competence, vigilance, and fear of material discomfort, to thrive outwardly in this society. I’ve managed to be useful, interesting, and lucky enough to have acquired a small amount of influence with a few powerful people, putting me in a very rare position on this earth.
So far, not even multiple sclerosis has been able to truly threaten my material safety. But I can’t deny that I see the wolves circling more clearly now.
Our culture, forged in capitalism, elevates only traits and values that are easily seen and commodified. So much of the pain I see in us, manifested so often as anger and selfishness, is caused by how alienated we are from ourselves.
On this I’ve been lucky too. My whole life, I’ve been able to hear my soul screaming underneath. I rarely knew how to provide succor to my soul, aching with no explanation or relief. So I looked away when I could, numbed when I couldn’t, and felt ripped apart when neither worked. Even tonight, I find myself unable to explain the pain. The best I can do with words is merely scattered words—lonely with friends, rejecting affection, sensitive boy, insatiable need, deep shame, infinite beauty, overwhelming joy lost the moment it’s noticed.
In the photon’s frame of reference, the moment it leaves the star and the moment it hits your eye are the same.
Identity is a funny thing. Seven years ago, I met my wife, Marisa Kahle, now Marisa Famulare. Marisa was adopted from the Philippines by a Filipino immigrant mom and German-Irish-Polish dad who both had the right mix of talents, passports, competences, ambitions, fears, and luck to meet at work in the second half of the twentieth century in the United States.
Marisa, the brown child of mixed race parents in a white town, does not know the alienation of the soul. She is one whole person, who speaks and acts as one person, and always has. She has the right mix of talents, upbringing, competence, trust, and emotional security to thrive both inwardly and outwardly despite this society. She can see underneath the pain and alienation of others, always looking for connection, and not willing to settle for illusions of it.
She saw my soul, and mine managed to catch just enough light to see hers. Tomorrow we’ll be married five years.
It’s taken an enormous amount of work from us both for me to heal enough to be capable of partnership, and for us to form a true partnership together. Through all that, we’re surviving a pandemic and the loss of our son Dominic Joseph, born and died on October 8. 2021.1 As we hoped for ourselves very early on, we hold hands through everything, if only with our fingers just barely touching in the hardest times.
Today, at 1 in the morning, I’m holding my daughter, Rosemary Joy, born May 19, 2023, 12 days old. She rests on my shoulder after I feed her. Marisa, recovering well, sleeps upstairs, with the comfort of our sweet little dog, Niko. The house is quiet and full.
For perhaps the first time in my life, I feel truly safe and whole.
For attribution, please cite this work as:
Famulare (2023, May 31). Late-night reflections following the birth of my daughter. Retrieved from https://famulare.github.io/2023/05/31/Late-night-reflections-following-the-birth-of-my-daughter.html.
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I wrote about Dominic and our loss on Twitter and mirrored on Typefully. ↩