Kina is Four

Our publisher turned four today—an occasion celebrated in this newsroom with four mylar balloons, a cake shaped like a unicorn, the opening of assorted gifts, a Zoom sing-along, and a day on the town. This is the first birthday that Kina has truly anticipated, which you might think is sad, given the circumstances of the year, but she has no real baseline to which she can compare the events of the day, and so it was basically a 10/10 for her. If you ask her, she has had no better birthday.

She has been three for a very, very long time. It’s not totally clear to me that it would feel so long if… everything hadn’t happened this year, but I think I’m glad for it. We all got a lot out of Kina being three—the hilarious highs, the crushing lows, the poop and sleep deprivation. If you’ve been around for a while, you’ve heard it all, but we’ve lived it. I will remember the last year of Kina’s life for the rest of my own.

At the end of last year, she stopped sleeping. She was terrified of our leaving the room at bedtime and would wake in terror all night. Invariably, we’d bring her into our bed at 3:30 AM, and she’d fall into a fitful slumber, punching me in the eye repeatedly until dawn. This went on for two months. Finally, Laurea and I, in desperation, paid a professional Canadian mother to tell us to suck it up and let Kina cry it out. On February 21st, after nine anxious days, she slept through the night. It felt like the lifting of a spell whose portent we didn’t understand.

Exactly one month later, we all got sick.

For her third birthday, we held a birthday party in a dive bar down by the waterfront with a light-up dance floor. It looked great in pictures, but it smelled like stale beer and cake. There was a puppet show and a depressed bartender, and the two seven-year-old boys we invited were trying to kill each other. I remember thinking “three is the hard year”. I didn’t know.

It was four years ago, though, that felt like the last real calamity. It felt like everything that could have gone wrong with Laurea’s labor had come to pass, and I found myself literally running between Laurea in a shared recovery room and Kina in the neonatal ICU—the two people I loved most in the world. I went to church that week to pray, which I never do. The first week of her life is another stretch of time that I will never forget. I have not gotten over it.

In the summer before she was born, we kept seeing signs. Baby eagles play-fighting, grappling with each other in tight spirals, until one of them lost a feather, which drifted slowly to the ground at our feet. A baby bobcat, alone, walking warily past us on a road by the beach in California. A young hawk in the branches over our heads at a Chinatown park. We called her the Everything Bagel, but in my mind she was a wild animal. These signs, another portent, gave us real hope in the midst of a long stretch of worry. She did not want to be caught. She was vital, vigorous.

Even in the NICU, I could see that she was strong, could hear her wailing two corridors away. “She’s got real pipes,” the nurse would say. I’d sit there in her room, holding her against my chest, an amateur dad with an amateur baby. She ate well, weathered the nonsense, wore a cute hat. Seven days later, she and her mother came out fine, like nothing ever happened. I took a picture of her in the minutes after we finally made our way home. She is dressed as a polar bear, still strapped into her car seat on our coffee table. That is the picture of victory.

There is a video of Kina on the morning of her third birthday, wrapped in her puppy blanket while we sing her “Happy Birthday”. She still doesn’t really know that her birthday is special, and in every single photo we have of her from that day, she seems perplexed at the hullaballoo. We celebrated the birthday of this befuddled toddler all weekend. Three days later, we flew to California to see her grandmother. It was the first trip we had ever made with her in which she was totally chill. In the photos of that plane ride, she is wearing her puppy blanket and watching Mickey Mouse. That trip (our last out of New York) was nourishing in a way that we didn’t yet know we needed it to be. I’ve thought about it a lot in the last several months.

Kina weathered our bout of COVID like a champ. She’d rub my forehead between episodes of Daniel Tiger, asking if I’d like a bowl of “Grandpère’s special veggie soup”. I kept thinking about how hard it must be to be sick without a three-year-old to offer you imaginary soup. I also thought a lot about how smart we were to engage the services of a professional Canadian mother in the month before the world fell apart. At night, I’d open the door to her room and gaze at her, knowing that she felt safe in her bed. I cannot underscore strongly enough how much that helped keep me calm during the scariest illness of my life. If you ever hit a bad spell, just get yourself a sleeping three-year-old and a fake bowl of Canadian soup.

Today started like most days lately, at 6:24 AM, with the sound of Kina leaping off her bed in the room next to ours, then sprinting to our door to wake us up. She isn’t a three-year-old anymore, but she’s had a wonderful year playing the part, even if the rest of us are a mess. There is a picture of her from yesterday, when her teacher, Ms. Olenick, brought a present over and engaged Kina in some precious masked-up small talk. Ms. Olenick and I had both kneeled down to take a picture of the two of them together, and Kina kneeled down, too, in solidarity. In the picture, she is thrilled to be here, on the sidewalk, with her real life teacher and me, kneeling in celebration of her birth. That, also, is the picture of victory.

Please enjoy a slice of cake on this, the best day of the year.

dad