The girls got their first teeth recently. I remember the finger in the mouth, the sharp little ridge & the surprise of it.
I wanted to tell my mum, that was the reflex. Not grief exactly, just the hand reaching for a phone.
She's missed the teeth. She's missed a year of daily laughing, the kind that starts for no reason and sets the other one off. And in a few weeks she'll miss their first birthday.
I keep a running list of these without meaning to.
She said it to me before any of it happened.
"You're going to be an amazing father."
I didn't believe her. I thought she was doing the thing mothers do by saying the generous version because it costs nothing and it's what you say.
I've thought about that line more in the last year than in the whole time I had her.
She wasn't subtle about pride.
She cried. She hugged you and told you outright. There was no reading between lines with her, no working out what she meant. If she was proud, you knew within about four seconds.
Which is why the not-knowing is strange to me now. I've built things this year. Worked smarter than ever before. Kept two people alive who couldn't do it themselves. And there's no crying, no hug, no one saying it plainly.
I have to do the maths myself. Would she be proud? It's a worse system.
The takeaway:
I used to think grief was about the person being absent. A year in, I think it's more specific than that. It's the absence of a particular witness; the one person who was going to confirm you'd turned out alright.
You don't replace that. You just start doing it without confirmation.
The line she gave me has become something else in the meantime. Not a prediction I'm waiting to have proven, but just an instruction. She said what I'd be, and now the only honest response is to go and be it, without her scoring it.
Most evenings I'm on the sofa after they've gone down. The house does that thing where it's suddenly very quiet and the chaos has dispersed.
That's when I think about her. Not dramatically. Just a few minutes of it, and then the evening carries on.
She'd have been unbearable about the girls, giving them everything they could possibly want & obsessing over every little detail.
I think she'd be proud. I can't verify it, but I'm going to think that anyway.
See you next time. — Antonio