A Letter to My Baby Daughter, Ginny
Dear Ginny,
It’s me. Your dad. I’m making a video for you every week, for when you’re older. So that you can look back and know what your life was like when you were tiny.
This is your story: my gift to you, sometimes ugly, sometimes painful, sometimes funny but always full of love.
The videos are brutally honest about the parenting experience, with a lot of heart and humour as well. Initially, they were meant just for you but a few other parents reached out saying how much they relate to them.
It takes an enormous amount of time and care to look after a baby, so much so that until I actually had you I couldn’t comprehend it. We were all loved into existence but sadly, we have no memory of it.
The thanklessness of it all has made me realise for the first time the sacrifices my parents made. It made me wonder how they felt about parenthood; what sort of baby was I? When I reached out to ask my parents, they spoke in generalities. Time has erased most of their memories of my earliest days and what remains is seen through rose-coloured glasses.
Maybe someday, if you decide to have children you can look at these and not feel alone.
This first video covers the birth and the first eight weeks of your life – and the impact you made on us in this short space of time.
The hospital was good. Everyone there knew what they were doing. Then the nurses made an unforgivable mistake: They handed you to me and said go home! There were no-skill testing questions, no criminal checks, not even an inquiries into our plans or knowledge. They were just letting us take you home.
You can’t claim any prize without a skill-testing question and they were letting us take you, a living human being home!
But your mother had read the books, and I have vague memories of the OG run of Full House so we could do this, right?
At the very least, as long as we fed you we could do the rest. But we got you home and the issues started, “Is this normal?”
There was a lot we didn’t know but at least we were feeding you.
But then we had our first home visit from the midwife. She informed that us that you weren’t latching properly. That meant you weren’t actually eating. We weren’t doing the ONE thing we were convinced we were doing right. The one thing that is supposed to be nature…wasn’t. We were mortified. Just one question remained…
How do we feed her?
And this was just the start, as this, my first of many videos dedicated to your life, explains.
Love,
Dad
You can subscribe to Luke’s Letters to My Daughter YouTube channel here, and follow him on Instagram here.