Dad says...

Ashley has been asking me to post for a while now, and I figure this isn't going to write itself, so I wanted to try and add the dad's perspective of the last few weeks.

It's never easy to sit down and try to sort through the emotions one feels when his tiny, beautiful daughter is found to be anything less than absolutely perfect. I'm not above telling everyone that I was an absolute wreck for a few days as we began to learn about the myriad different possibilities that could be causing Audrey's visual impairment. All the things I thought would help me cope (friends, surfing, staying busy at work) only masked the emotions.

Despite my best efforts, I would be sitting on my board, watching pelicans, clouds, little baitfish, or something else equally trivial, and would just break down emotionally, silently, as I wondered if I would ever be able to share the sights of my life with my daughter.

Then I'd worry about her as a teenager, or a young adult, or even a parent herself, and the challenges that would doubtlessly lie ahead for her. It was absolutely overwhelming for me as a parent, what with my experience of all of 3 months, to try and comprehend.

I soon began to realize that what I was mourning was not the death of her future, or the end of her dreams, but the death of my previous expectations, which were never really based on anything other than mere thoughts anyway. My daughter is fine. In a lot of ways, she is better than fine. Things will be a little different than I might have expected them to be, but I will still be a father to a beautiful, vibrant, happy girl for the rest of my life. And that is wonderful.

She has begun babbling (according to my mom, at an even younger age than I did), and we have little conversations every night before she goes to bed. We talk about all the things we did that day, or what our weekend plans are, or which of her several extended family of "aunts" and "uncles" will come to visit her tomorrow. Sometimes I do most of the talking, and that's fine, and I like to think that she knows when she should just listen. Because sometimes Dad just likes to talk. Seems to run in the family...

I'll admit, other times we talk about what the future will hold, and how she has an army behind her on her quest, but not all that much, the present is much more exciting. It's a lot like a quote I read once-

"We live in the past, where nostalgia makes us sad, or in the future, where our worries cause us anxiety. We fail to grasp that this moment we are in is all there ever was or all there ever will be. Life is, was, and ever will be, simply now."