I Met My North Star on My Birthday
I have no memory of the day I first met my father.
No infant remembers the first pair of hands that held them or the first face that looked back with wonder. Memory comes later. Love comes first.
Yet over the years, Appa told me that story so many times that it became my memory too.
He would smile before he even began.
“You looked like a golden doll,” he would say.
“Your eyes sparkled.”
“I couldn’t stop looking at you.”
As a child, I accepted those words the way children accept the sky—without questioning them. Every father probably tells his daughter she is beautiful, I thought.
Only after he was gone did I begin to understand what those words really meant.
I began imagining that first meeting from his side instead of mine.
A young father, waiting outside a hospital room.
A heart racing with anticipation.
A tiny little girl, fresh from the hands of God, knowing nothing of the world—not disappointment, not fear, not prejudice, not expectations.
Only innocence.
Perhaps that is why he loved looking at me.
And perhaps, had I possessed the awareness I have today, I would have looked back at him with exactly the same wonder.
I imagine him now as he must have been then—young, hopeful, carrying dreams much larger than his means, unaware of the extraordinary journey we were about to share.
He always said he had been excited to meet me.
I like to think I was just as excited to meet him.
Because long before he became my father…
He became my North Star.