Dear Jonas,

While I was pregnant with you I read, among other things, The Tin Drum and A Personal Matter—neither of which take a comforting approach to childbirth. I read these to myself, and to you I read Proust. I liked the idea that we will probably keep reading Proust until you’re a teenager, and I couldn’t wait to sit next to your bassinet and read you to sleep. As it happens, that’s just not something you’re into yet. When I tried you looked frustrated, as if I were giving you orders you couldn’t carry out. Nonetheless, I want to read to you, so I’m trying a new strategy: poetry. At first it just seemed like a practical way to appease myself. We don’t have to worry about saving our spot or finishing a chapter. We can keep a collection in the diaper bag and start wherever we want whenever we want. I can cheat and keep reading when you fall asleep in the park, then pick up back where we left off without boring myself. If we read the same poem 10 times before we can move on to the next one, well, that’s what we should be doing anyway. I realized this is how I want you to learn how to read. Poetry makes more sense than Proust.

Your first collection is Adam Zagajewski’s Mysticism for Beginners. To get us started, I had pulled out the big blue Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Michael Hofmann’s Corona, Corona, and Zagajewksi. There’s a certain Gainesville pedigree to this sequence that I wasn’t really thinking about when I grabbed the books, and maybe I’ll explain that to you later. I picked up Zagajewski first simply because I haven’t read him yet, and this seems to have been a good choice. You let me read 5 poems: “A Quick Poem,” “Transformation,” “September,” “Mysticism for Beginners,” and “Anthology.” You were attentive throughout. I know you were probably just paying attention to my hair or staring at the shape of the book, but that’s not really the point. We’re starting something that, like any difficult method of study, won’t even start to make sense for years.

Here are some words from these first few poems that I like. Let’s just hold onto them for a while: garden, spider, crimson, roosters, cassock, bonfire, baroque, chestnut, sparks, swallows, herons, nightingale, scarlet.

Dear Jonas,

Pumpkins are in season, and I brought one home for you. This means Halloween is coming and the weather has turned. The warm, moist air you’ve gotten used to is now crisp and chilly. You stick your tongue out to test the difference, and you seem to approve. The mittens Laura knitted for you are on your little hands 24 hours a day, but you kick off your tiny socks after a few minutes. Today was your grandpa’s—my father’s—birthday, and when I was little he and I began a tradition that released in me a sort of immediate nostalgia. It has to do with the pumpkins. And the air. And cacti.

I suppose I should tell you about nostalgia first. The Greek root words for nostalgia are ‘returning home’ and ‘pain’: homesickness. In its early days, nostalgia was diagnosed as a physical illness. It is now understood as a psychic phenomenon similar to melancholy, which I will tell you about later. There are other generative types of nostalgia that things such as theme parks and political campaigns create, but I want to tell you about something quite different—something soft and private that teaches you how to coddle your past.

I’m going to guess that I was 3 years old when I had an experience that would later repeat itself countless times as nostalgia. My Dad picked me up from preschool at Peniel Baptist Academy in his sky blue Chevy pick-up truck. That truck had a CB that worked and a cigarette lighter we weren’t allowed to play with. Dad still had a long blonde ponytail and his beard was still red. On this particular day, once I was next to him in the bouncy cab of the Chevy, he explained that we were going to pick out a pumpkin on our way home. I actually don’t remember where we went and if it was a big patch of pumpkins or if we just went to the produce department at Publix. I do remember him explaining that we had to decide if we wanted a large or small, round or skinny one. Then we could examine all of the pumpkins with that shape until we found one that was just right. Importantly, the whole pumpkin did not have to be perfect. What it really needed was a nice smooth side that would serve as its face. Later we would decide what sort of a face (scary, silly, teeth or no teeth) to carve. When we were finished, our pumpkin would be lit from the inside with a little candle, and its transformation into a jack-o-lantern would be complete.

I am telling you how I remember this day, which might actually be a composite of several years of pumpkin carving with my father. The association of my Dad with pumpkins, and with the first cool weather of the year, and with our daily ritual of him picking me up from preschool, these are the impressions that come back to me. I also remember the first time I felt a memory bristle like this with loss and pleasure at the same time. The following summer, Dad and I were walking through the yard looking for vestigial cacti. Since we’d moved in two years earlier, he had been digging them up at the root one-by-one. On this particular day we were hunting for residual succulent mines, and talking about time. For some reason I wanted to know which month was my father’s favorite. He chose October for its weather and because of his birthday. When he said this, our previous October and the pumpkin came back to me. It felt like a regular memory, but it made my stomach tingle, too. The memory turned visceral, and the rest of my day became a comparison between today and last October. I can’t tell you if we found any cactus plants that day, but I felt as if I’d stepped on one anyway. Nostalgia is like that: you can never completely uproot it, and it will pierce you when you aren’t paying attention. You are better off just letting it grow.

In Japanese, “natsukashii,” condenses the term into an emotion. Someday you might find that a cat sinking as he tries to walk through snow or a chuckling diesel engine or a bush of white azaleas in first bloom triggers a memory so sharp that it derails your whole week, or ruins the new relationship to which you’ve been trying to devote yourself, or makes you want to call me, and when it does, you can. Just say, “Natsukashii, ne.” I’ll know what you mean.

Dear Jonas:

Today you, your Dad, and I went to the coffee shop around the corner for bagels and coffee. You’re starting to sit straight up in your sling, so you got to meet two of our neighbors and three dogs before we’d even left the apartment building. On our way into the coffee shop an old lady wandering down the street caught sight of you: “A boy!” she confirmed. Yes, I replied, wary of her approval. “Good!” she blared, and improbably started calling you “Butchy Butchy Butchy.” Your onesie was stitched with rainbow-colored giraffes outlined in pink and turquoise—the picture of infant machismo. (I’d thought your femme onesies would perform a sort of armor against the ever-present gender fairy godmothers, but I was dead wrong.) Suddenly, her face hardened: “Stupid pacifiers. I don’t believe in ‘em,” she chided us, and abruptly skulked away. We raised our eyebrows at each other and went into the coffee shop.

Daddy and I ordered, sat down, and began reading the paper. You fell asleep. I started, as usual, with the Sunday Styles' weekly homage to nihilism: the modern love column. Then I flipped through the rest of the section. I like seeing which topics are siphoned off as matters of style each week—their alleged silliness made anodyne through their separation from serious news. That wedding announcements and contemporary confessions of desire are interpreted as style seems as telling as the relocation of Frank Rich from Arts & Leisure to Op-Ed, but that was before your time. Today Sunday Styles ran an article, inspired by Mayor Bloomberg’s intention to run for a third term, on what one numerologist describes as the “sunshine” number: three. The article has gone silly over triplicates: “Whence, then, the lure of three? How did it become the perfect number of fairy tale characters, of stooges, of syllables in a loved one’s name — tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth?”

Me: “Huh. There’s this goofy article on the significance of the number three. It doesn’t mention the dialectic. Not even once.”

Daddy: “I’m sorry, did you not notice that you’re reading the STYLE section?”

Me: "I know. I know. But the dialectic is precisely about style; it uses form as argument."

Here’s Uncle Jameson on Adorno in Marxism and Form: “But dialectical thinking is thought to the second power, a thought about thinking itself, in which the mind must deal with its own thought process just as much as with the material it works on, in which both the particular content involved and the style of thinking suited to it must be held together in the mind at the same time.”

And Uncle Hebdige from Subculture and the Meaning of Style: “However, the challenge to hegemony which subcultures represent is not issued directly by them. Rather it is expressed obliquely, in style.”

Now, I understand that the New York Times is the antithesis of a subcultural publication, but its omissions frame and inform readers through a kind of dialectical process. Sunday Styles positions style as consumption, rendering it harmless and accessible. This argument is oblique only through its obviousness, leaving readers to think to the second power, to hold out for the possibility of what an analysis of style might bring. In other words, Butchy, after you learn how to make sense of what’s on the page, you’ll have to flip that skill and keep abreast of what you’re not seeing, too.

Dear Jonas,

For the next six months or so you will only eat one thing: breast milk. Its flavor may change depending upon what I eat, but you will have to grow some more before you experience food as a variegated, manipulative series of differences. As you get older, you will judge culinary success through a dish’s singularity as well as its ability to be reproduced. You will evaluate food according to how well it works within, whilst deviating from, its genre. I say “genre” because a meal’s style invokes its eponymous culture. A kind of gastronomic Epcot Center, categories such as Italian or Soul not only mime categories of identity, they prepare diners for hackneyed but reassuringly consistent flavors, ingredients, and packaging. For example, one expectation of American “Chinese Food” is that at the end of your meal you will be given a fortune cookie. This is a shimmery, crunchy, mass-produced confection with a piece of paper inside that either predicts your future, gives you advice, or tells you something about yourself. (This tradition actually seems to have started in Japan, which should tell you something about American food named after other countries.) The last type of fortune cookie is what I’d like you to think about.

For some other things I have to write, I’ve been thinking about the phrase “constitutive outside.” A theorist named Judith Butler uses this phrase to describe the repetitive and social ways in which recognition and belonging are individually and collectively endowed. Butler holds that seemingly static or transparent categories of identity are quite often the result of the enactment of a kind of statement named a “performative.” For example: “You are a boy.” I have repeated this statement to curious strangers since you’ve been born in response to the question of what you “are.” According to Butler, these kinds of performative speech acts have no force if they are only pronounced once, like a spell. A number of actions (performances) must follow (and precede) this pronouncement if its wisdom is to hold true. Conforming to and rejecting dominant understandings of what “boy” means will be a lifelong process. We, your parents, won’t be able to help our complicity with this process, but we are trying to be careful. We don’t believe that your gender is like the last kind of fortune cookie—static and didactic. The constitutive outside will swaddle you with layers of ways in which people understand what it does and will mean for you to be a boy. We hope your boyishness will, like a proper performative, reinstate itself in many different ways. We're here to help you with that process.

You are one month old.

You are asleep right now.

You are sometimes inconsolable. You are especially cranky in the afternoon.

You are not a fortune cookie.