Daddy’s Girl
My father is weaver. He takes broken things - like hearts, promises, and relationships - and works to bind them whole once more with his love and grace. I watched him weave melodies and bass lines into new rhythms that begged my feet to dance. I grew up hugging blankets of security that he created with forgiveness, crazy glue, patience, and hard work. He took threads of our cultural history, passport stamps, prayer, and pinky promises and wove a bond that feels unbreakable in our family.
In my childhood home, he kept us laughing so that the sounds of our highs and lows came together in a blend so smooth, it rivals the vibrancy of any star. My father is a weaver; he knits together the fragments of an unattainable immigrant American dream with the lessons of past mistakes into a miles long roadmap towards his daughters’ aspirations. He wiped my tears and mended my aching heart with a latticework of [corny] jokes and reminders of who the f*ck I am and where the f*ck I come from (#Brooklyn).
With weathered hands, my father braids possibilities with ancestral defiance…refutes the normalcy of machismo and holds tight to his partner in all that this world brings. He intertwines his love for my mother with his penchant for effortless remixes so that their footsteps never falter as they dance through each season of life. My father is a creator of possibilities and new beginnings; he makes things from what we were told was nothing - a regular degular guy from who pointed to the sky’s tapestry of constellations and showed me that I, too, have that same magic to create a world where I get to be its brightest star ✨
Happy birthday Daddy!
