A Letter to Sam on His Second Birthday

Dear Sam,

You are two today.

You have not slept through the night since February. I want this documented, not as a complaint — I am not complaining, I know you will eventually crack this — but as a record. You are two years old and you are still, reliably, awake at some point between midnight and 4am with a specific need that requires another human to attend to it. Last week the need was water. The week before, it was your sock. On Tuesday, you were awake at 2:17am simply to announce that there were biscuits somewhere in the house, which is both true and not relevant at 2:17am.

I am writing this while you are asleep, which is the safest time to write anything in this house.

Who you are at two

You are a person of tremendous physical confidence and complete absence of spatial awareness. You run at things with your whole body. You have not yet developed a useful relationship with the concept of stopping. Furniture is, in your current model of the world, a secondary surface you occasionally make contact with on the way to the primary surface, which is wherever you are going with such urgency.

You hug with your whole self. Not the arms-extended, polite hug of someone who has learned the social form — the full-body collision hug of someone who has decided that contact should be complete or not at all. When you hug Ellie she makes a noise like someone slightly winded. She hugs you back immediately.

You are obsessed with things that go. Vehicles of all kinds — buses have a particular status, but also lorries, trains, anything that moves at a scale larger than a car. You point them out with a specific sound that is not quite "bus" but is unmistakably "bus-directed enthusiasm." You have this sound for the bus near our house, for the refuse lorry on Thursdays, for the train you can hear from the garden on quiet mornings.

You are learning to talk and the words arrive in clusters: sometimes nothing new for a week, then three new things in a day. Last month you said "more please" as a complete unit for the first time. It was so unexpected, so complete and properly syntactical, that I looked at your mother and we both laughed with the particular startled joy of people who didn't know they were waiting for a thing until it arrived.

What I want you to know

I was 42 when you were born. I know you don't know this yet — you have no framework for what 42 means, any more than Ellie has a framework for what it means that I was alive before certain music existed. You will understand it eventually, and when you do, I want you to have this record of what it meant from the inside.

What it meant is this: by the time you arrived, I had enough life behind me to know that the specific weight of a sleeping two-year-old on a chest at 2:17am is a thing that does not last. Not because anything is wrong, but because time is relentless and children become people and people eventually stop needing to sleep on you.

I know this because I watched it happen with your sister, whose sleep I cracked at eighteen months and who now sleeps in her own bed with great competence and would be mildly offended by the suggestion that she might need to sleep on someone.

What I am saying is: I stayed still. Last week, at 2:17am, when you had announced the biscuits and been persuaded that the biscuits could wait and had leaned against me with the full confidence of someone who has decided that I am a reliable surface — I stayed still for longer than I needed to. Not for efficiency. For the weight of you, which I know is temporary, which I know I will not be able to reconstruct from memory later.

The things that are yours already

You have your mother's capacity for intensity — the complete commitment to the thing you are currently doing, the absolute presence in it. When you are looking at a bus, you are not slightly looking at a bus. You are looking at a bus the way a person looks at something that matters.

You have an instinct for comedy that I don't know where you got, but that produces a specific expression — a half-suppressed smile, a sidelong look — that is recognisably yours and that I have never seen on another child's face.

You have a relationship with Ellie that is already more complex than I expected at two. You antagonise her deliberately and then present yourself for consolation with complete confidence that it will be provided. She provides it, grumbling. You accept it without apparent awareness of the transaction you just executed. This is either manipulation or pure social instinct and I genuinely can't tell which, but I am watching it with interest.

The thing I want to remember

This specific birthday morning. You came into the kitchen at 7:12am — I noted the time — said "birthday" with some authority, and looked around as though expecting the room to have been changed to reflect this assessment.

We gave you a balloon. You held it for a minute with the expression of someone encountering a paradox — something lighter than everything else, pulling upward, untethered — and then let it go, watched it reach the ceiling, and decided this was correct.

I agree. That is the right thing to do with a thing that wants to go upward.

Happy birthday, Sam. I am planning to be here for all of them.

Love, Dad