My World in The Palm of My Hand

I wrote this in college for a Creative Writing course, back in 1992-93. Assignment was to write a descriptive piece...I wrote about my daughter.

She is so tiny – yet so powerful. With only a look she pulls the strings of my heart. With her every murmur and every movement my heart lurches, filling with her beauty and perfection. Her head barely fills my hand, her feet barely reach to my bicep as she lies on my arm, held to my chest.

She is so tiny, so small. I hold her hand in my fingers and marvel at the tinyest of fingernails on her little finger. Fingers so small and frail that light seems to shine through them. Her hand is barely able to encircle my thumb as she holds it. Along her arms, and over most of her body, is the lightest, almost invisible, sprinkling of little hairs I have ever seen. Like the downy fuzz of a peach, but much lighter and softer. On her head it is thicker and softer, looking as frail as spider's silk. Touching it, smoothing it with my fingers it is so soft and light it seems to have no substance; I close my eyes and my fingers can scarcely sense the hair between them. Her mouth, with tiny puckered pink lips, looks like the bud of a flower. Even her breath, fluttering so lightly against my skin, stirs my heart. Is it possible to smell innocence? For surely it is there, behind the warm milk smell...sweetness and innocence. And in her eyes, those eyes of a blue so dark as to be nearly black. Her eyes shine pure innocence. If the eyes reflect the soul, then the eyes of this child, so new and untainted by the world, are the reflection of a purity which can never be recaptured. Each moment, each day and year that passes in her life will leave the touches of experiences and of the world, good and bad, upon her, so that never again will she be as she is right now. But for now she looks with such trust and openness at everything around her.

As I hold her, looking at this little creature who is a part of me and at the same time a completely new person, I am filled with such strong, overwhelming feelings. I feel a desperate urge to protect her from the world, from the things that wait for her down the road of her life. I look into her eyes looking at me so trustingly and openly and I know I can never let her be hurt, to feel pain or sorrow. Will her first skinned knee tear at my heart as painfully as the thought of such a thing happening to her soft delicate skin does now?

Holding her it is so easy to believe childhood stories of good fairies and fairy godmothers who, with the wave of a magic wand, bless a new child with beauty and grace, for surely nothing so miraculously perfect and beautiful could come about from some haphazard meeting of cells and genes. By whatever means she has been blessed with life and her perfection and beauty, I beg that she also be able to grow in love and happiness and to know her full potential, for without a doubt here in the palm of my hand I hold my entire world.

Looking at it nearly 30-years later I see parts that could be written better...but I leave it as I wrote originally.