Our newborn’s pediatrician puts on a big show about entertaining any and all questions we may have.
She ends every appointment by turning her attention to us, the rookie parents, and asking what questions we “really” have, as if everything up to that point had just been for show and now we’re going to see behind the curtain.
But she doesn’t really want to hear our questions. At least not mine.
I know this because she was very dismissive when I asked her if it was possible that feeding my baby opens a portal to a ghost dimension. She didn’t even entertain the thought for a second despite the overwhelming evidence supporting my theory.
After I described the astounding number of signs indicating that my baby communicates with ghosts, the doctor shrugged it off as my daughter “going to her happy place.”
I rarely disagree with a doctor on matters of medicine, but edible happy places aren’t legal in this state – and if they were, two months is far too young to try.
Yet I’m stuck with a medical diagnosis that my daughter’s happiness is displayed by intensely staring into a void of space. If true, what kind of father am I to raise a daughter who celebrates happiness this way?
The only other people who recreationally stare into voids are opioid addicts and serial killers. All I can think of is thank God she’s cute because I doubt she’ll get many matches on her online dating profile when she lists her interests as staring at walls and occasionally forgetting to breathe.
My daughter’s hairstyle also suggests a timeless influence. Only someone who views ghosts as contemporaries would choose to wear their hair like Benjamin Franklin, the man who famously put a raccoon butt on his head and was told, “it’s a good look for you, keep it.”
My daughter has a haunting familiarity with that plane from whence she came – the place where life exists before birth and (dare we hope) after death.
I feel that she walks in lightness, not darkness. They’ll never make a movie about her but could make a miniseries starring Michael Landon. And if you’re thinking, “but Michael Landon’s dead,” pay attention – it’s not a problem, she can still reach him.
I am willing to entertain the possibility that my daughter is actually just a happy person. In those moments I wonder: what if she’s just existing? Perfectly content without any anxiety, fears, or stress.
Sometimes I stare at her amazed by the total lack of bags under her eyes. It’s as if she doesn’t even know yet that life is terrifying.
My daughter, the zen master, mastering consciousness in a pool of feces and butt cream.
She’s tapped into different planes of my own reality awakening parts of my soul I didn’t know I had, like the ability to create songs about a diaper’s wetness indicator changing from yellow to blue.
If she can be this much of a transformational force in my life, it doesn’t seem far-fetched for her to play a similar role in the universe. Watching her form from the tiniest cells of my wife and I feels like a direct communication with, if not God, at least some spiritual or elemental force of nature.
Whether or not she sees ghosts, it feels true and that’s all the justification I need to keep playing “what if”.
What if that blank stare is more than just seeing ghosts? What if she is glimpsing the most essential truths of life, time, and meaning?
What if she’s being visited from beyond by ancestors stretching back from early man to my own mother, who would have absolutely adored her?
Or what if it’s just the look of someone with active bowels? In which case I understand why our pediatrician doesn’t actually care to answer any question we may have.
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