## Metadata - Author: [[Brian Gresko]] - Full Title: When I First Held You - Category: #books ## Highlights - Whoever says adults are better than children at paying attention is wrong; we adults are too busy filtering out the world, hurrying to some appointment or another, paying no attention. Our kids are the ones discovering new continents all day long. Sometimes, looking at them, I feel as if Henry and Owen live permanently in that resplendent state of awareness that grown-ups only reach when our cars are sliding on ice through a red light or our airplane is thudding through turbulence. ([Location 802](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FX7RBJ8&location=802)) - “Even lovers,” Annie Dillard writes, “even twins, are strangers who will love and die alone.” ([Location 838](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FX7RBJ8&location=838)) - All those lives, all those people—each of us operates at a vertex of a vast, three-dimensional, crisscrossing network of relationships. Son, brother, husband, father, friend, teacher. No life is superfluous. And yet thousands go out the door every hour. Look upon this body as you drink and enjoy yourself; for you will be just like it when you are dead. There goes Mary Leakey’s family of three; there goes John Keats; there goes Aunt Dorothy; there goes Jon Jon Stravers and poor, sweet, three-year-old Jonah. The great network vibrates and swings as lives are plucked out of it, one after another. ([Location 858](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FX7RBJ8&location=858)) - When you watch your kids begin to grow up, you cannot help but feel your impermanence more acutely; you cannot help but see how you are one link in a very long chain of parents and children, and that the best thing you have ever done and ever will do is to extend that chain, to be a part of something greater than yourself. That’s really what it means to be a father—to be continually reminded that you are taking part in something much larger than your own terrifyingly short life. ([Location 862](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FX7RBJ8&location=862)) - Children are worked toward, clumsily, imperfectly, with a deep and almost religious faith in trial and error. Children are refined over time with the assistance of many imperfect philosophies. ([Location 885](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FX7RBJ8&location=885)) - What is being a father? It’s letting someone else be a child. It’s suffering through certain kinds of abstract pain so that they don’t. It’s bearing the brunt of disappointments so that they can go on feeling invincible. It’s teaching how to forget as much as it is teaching how to remember. ([Location 965](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FX7RBJ8&location=965)) - Rituals are when we wish to repeat what has already happened, rehearsals when we repeat what we fear might yet occur. Maybe the two are one and the same, our way to parley and haggle with time. ([Location 993](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FX7RBJ8&location=993)) - my massively amplified vulnerability to loss), ([Location 1446](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FX7RBJ8&location=1446)) - human caravan of cuteness, ([Location 1607](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FX7RBJ8&location=1607)) - I should learn to cook, yes, but the best I can give my daughter is the dad she actually has, not the dad she should have. ([Location 2368](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FX7RBJ8&location=2368)) - I would like to make use of a generationally permitted reboot, if at all possible, to make life better for my daughter, to be a father of intention, a delighted, aspiring, ambitious father. ([Location 2405](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FX7RBJ8&location=2405)) - I’m not an atheist, but I believe that the Great Spirit animating our lives is love. I want Maddie and Xander to follow Emerson’s advice and have an original relationship to the universe. ([Location 2764](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FX7RBJ8&location=2764)) - Our Father Who Art in Heaven chooses to remain an anonymous donor. He gave us a cup of his light—all men think their spunk is radiant—but he refuses to identify himself as either Jehovah, Jesus, Allah, Krishna, or L. Ron Hubbard. He’s not going to play an active role in our lives, so that means we’re all living like lesbians. ([Location 2770](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FX7RBJ8&location=2770)) - love is about alleviating the loneliness of the hermit in our heads. Our thoughts reside in a bony cave, and we need someone to distract us from dwelling on that depressing notion for our entire lives. ([Location 2785](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FX7RBJ8&location=2785)) - We might witness comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hitting Jupiter or someone getting ALS, but we’re unable to fully experience someone else’s pain. The true marvel of children and novels is that they allow us to imagine someone else’s hardships. ([Location 2817](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FX7RBJ8&location=2817)) - Not that any father can take any credit for his children after they’re born. Once they start talking and walking, they’re individuals free to be happy or sad. ([Location 2822](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FX7RBJ8&location=2822)) - Our conversation made me realize that good parents like Chloe and Elvira and good Bobs and Michaels are field guides for our children on how to live. Each volume contains its own expertise on making bad decisions, recovering from painful events, and identifying toxic, selfish assholes. I’m determined to stay in print. ([Location 2830](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FX7RBJ8&location=2830))