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Many years ago, the 45-year-old Zhou Guoping was happy to have a girl, but the girl was diagnosed with a terminal illness shortly after birth, and spent a short life with this terminal illness very cute and pitiful. In the midst of the pain, Zhou Guoping's book "Lady Girl: Notes of a Father" written for you has moved countless readers to tears, and many people still say that it is a book that makes people sad enough not to have the courage to read it a second time.
After seven years of losing his daughter, he welcomed his second daughter Tweet and recorded the story of Tweet from birth to elementary school from birth to primary school from the perspective of an ordinary father and philosopher- "Baby, Baby". Many readers have wondered, what kind of existence is the same as daughters, girls and chirps in Zhou Guoping's heart? Will tweet be some kind of replacement for chicks? Growing up, how did tweets understand the existence of chicks? How do you tell your child about death? The following article, included in the last volume of "Baby, Baby", may be able to solve our puzzles.
Zhou Guoping tweeted with his daughter
Toward the end of the book, let me go back to the afternoon when I first shouted "Daddy" loudly in eight months, when I couldn't stop shedding a lot of tears, because I remembered the girl, my first daughter who left me at the age of one and a half.
Like chirping, the chicks clearly and continuously shout out "Daddy" in the eighth month, and "Daddy" is the first word that the Chicks will say plainly. That day, I took her from Yu'er's arms and suddenly blurted out a clear "Daddy". Then there was another shout, and she giggled. Since then, the music of her calling "Daddy" has been playing in my ears every day until it came to an abrupt end on a Black Thursday afternoon. My arms were suddenly empty, the world was suddenly silent, and I used to think that in this life, I would never hear the call of "Daddy" again, and I would no longer enjoy the honor of being a father.
Now, after seven and a half years of silence, a little life has called me "Daddy" loudly again, once again generously conferring upon me the most glorious title of a man. The sound of the girl's beginning to shout "Daddy" is still in front of her ears, overlapping with the sound of chirping at this moment. My feelings are mixed, there is sorrow in happiness, there is sadness in joy, and in the end it all comes down to deep gratitude. I am grateful to God, and from the reaffirmation of my life from childhood, I know that God has not abandoned me.
In the preface to a certain edition of, I wrote—
"Now I have another daughter, as cute as a chick, but with a health that a chick doesn't have. Of course, I love her very much, no less than I did in the first place. I would even say that now she occupies all my fatherly love, for at this moment she is my only child, all the children of the world, just as she was the only child and all the children of the world. There's nothing wrong with that. All new life comes from the same divine source, all miracles that have to be surprised, treasures that have to be loved. ”
"Lady Girl: Notes of a Father" by Zhou Guoping
So, I don't want to be a chick anymore?
I don't want to answer this question categorically with yes or no, preferring to make an honest analysis of my state of mind.
Time is the cure for all the pains of life. It's a good medicine, not a panacea, and time is a stupid way to wait for your wounds to slowly scab and heal.
If I no longer have children, the grief of losing her will gradually lessen, and the miss of her will gradually weaken. However, the fatherly instinct awakened by the girl, the strong need to have a child, is the most difficult to be consumed by time, and the vacancy left by the girl's departure will be open for a long time in my life.
No matter how much I love a girl who is already in heaven, my earthly fatherly love must rest on a realistic object. Fatherly love is an energy that, like all energies, must be released. With the chirping, my fatherly love hanging in the air fell to the ground, and my earthly life had a real core and purpose. At the same time, being the father of a healthy child is an experience I have never had, and my fatherly love has gained a more solid foothold. At that time, the illness of the girl made me full of worry, and I was fully engrossed in the girl, feeling extremely sharp and meticulous, and the bottom of my heart was always fear and emptiness.
Now, my mood is relaxed and cheerful, and the feeling may not be so sharp, but there is another kind of meticulousness in calmness. The same kind of fatherly love, the same love, has been displayed more normally and for a longer time.
That certainly doesn't mean I don't want to be a chick. The real situation is that, on the one hand, time will gradually weaken the thoughts of the living for the deceased, and on the other hand, time can never calm the thoughts, and in some unpredictable moments, this thought will suddenly rise up, no less intense than the beginning of the birth and death, and both aspects of the situation have nothing to do with whether there is another child.
Years have brought the great experiences in life farther and farther, and you can't remember them if you want to, but no matter how far you go, it is always in your life, and you can't forget them.
So I understood that chirping is chirping, chicks are chicks, they are all independent lives, one can never replace the other. Whether I have another child or not, the miserable fate of the girl will not change in the slightest, so the sorrow in my heart will never disappear, it will always be there, but like some physical ailments, it will not occur from time to time, but only in a certain climate. That is why I want to limit the scope of this grief and never let it become a shadow in the life of the tweet.
For Tweet, this tragic story that happened years before her birth belonged only to her father and had nothing directly to do with her.
Based on this realization, I went on to write in the preface I quoted above: "I thank God for giving me the joy of fatherhood. But please don't say that this is a compensation for the loss of my daughter, and please don't say that the new little life is a substitute for the little life that was lost. I prefer to think that the arrival of a new life is an independent event in my life, without any causal connection to my past experiences. She is still irreplaceable, and my current daughter cannot, should not, and I have no right to make her a substitute. ”
Zhou Guoping and tweet
Did Tweet know that Dad once had a daughter named Chick?
Absolutely. Hong and I both thought that sooner or later she would know, but there was no need to tell her deliberately, let alone deliberately hide it from her, just let it go. In fact, she gradually learned that it was indeed a very natural process.
When she was four years old, she took out a piece of paper and prepared to draw. She paints on discarded copy paper with words on one side, and she draws on the other side of the blank. This time, she took the paper and told us, "There's a picture on it." "When I looked at it, it was a proof of a page of the Taiwanese version of "Youniu", and the photo printed in the corner of the page was me holding the girl. I pretended to ask Red, "Whose picture is it?" Unexpectedly, she replied first: "It's Sister Youyi." I was taken aback, exchanged a look with Red, and asked, "How do you know?" Answer: "Xiao Yan said." The photo was printed very vaguely, and I pointed to the photo and asked, "Who is this?" She said she didn't know.
"Baby, Baby" is a real shot
When I was five years old, one day I went to pick her up at the kindergarten, and as soon as I walked out of the classroom, she immediately told me: "The teacher said that she cried when she saw the 'Lady Girl' that you wrote. By this time, all she knew was that I had written a book called "Youyi", which told the story of a little girl named Youniu.
When I was six, I was on TV and she watched it. At the beginning of the show, the host introduced my life, talked about the girl, said it too clearly, and inserted a photo of me holding the girl. She was confused, and asked me, "Who is you?" I said, "Daddy will tell you this story in a moment." Later she didn't ask again, but she probably understood something in her heart.
When she was seven, she and her mother had a conversation on the way out in the car.
She asked, "Mom, is there really such a person in the book daddy wrote?" ”
Mom replied, "Dad and Mom were fifty years old when they got married, and at such an old age, he could have been married once before." He had a daughter who died of cancer when she was one and a half years old. Dad was very sad and stayed with her all the time. ”
"What about her mother?"
"She's with her."
"Where is she now?"
"Now she's married and has a child."
The mystery was solved, and she knew for sure on this day the existence of a real chick.
One day when she was eight, she brought me a page, looked at me, smiled, and said, "I found this." Her laughter has the meaning of peeking into my secret and understanding, and there is also the meaning of relief. As soon as I looked, it was a page in the proof of the Lecture Transcript, and there was an excerpt from my words, the paragraph in the preface to "Youyi" that said that she and Youniu were my "only and all children."
On the same day, one of her diaries fell apart, she rebinded it herself, and I found that she had used the page as the back cover.
I was very touched in my heart. I know that in this act of hers, there is a wordless understanding and cherishing.
New version of "Baby, Baby"