fun in threes, sometimes fours
the boy
The Girl was born in December: to go outside was a major project requiring actual planning and considerable logistics in the form of layers of protection. The Boy, on the other hand, is a spring baby.
This means that he and the berries are ripening together.
It’s probably a good thing that newborns need to be held constantly, because if they hoped to do anything else, those dreams would soon shatter.
Who can resist the fresh scent and bobbing head of a newborn? Who can see a gurgling newborn and not hold his arms out? They are out there, but I’ve never understood them.
We are reminded of what true innocence is, of what it means to be totally trusted, of what softness and sweetness really are.
Note: The photo of me under the deck with the Boy is the work of the Girl. It appears this is a post in which she’s absent, but she’s moving to the other side of the shutter.
The Girl has been the center of a small cluster of orbiting adults for her entire life. Mama, Tata, Nana, Papa, Babcia, Dziadek — all circle around her in their own cycles and epicycles, drifting into apogee, out of perigee, but always circling.
It’s been all about her dance rehearsal, her play dates, her mini photography sessions, her wants and needs.
As she has spun, so we have rotated around her.
But now there’s competition. “The boy” has become a newly frequent tag for posts here, and the Girl is likely beginning to wonder just how many pictures of a baby sleeping we can possibly take. And she’s beginning to wonder just how much one little caterpillar can cry.
It’s a learning experience in countless ways. The Girl is learning she’s no longer the center; we’re learning now to make her realize that it’s now simply an elliptical orbit, with two foci.
A wise web visitor — as well as others — once pointed out that we’ll need to work on the sibling relationship as well. It’s a little trickier, because making the Girl realize she’s not suddenly an outsider is something within my control: I can take positive steps to affect that, like spending the afternoon with her riding bikes as we did today. The sibling relationship seems at first blush more like a “lead a horse to water” situation
Yet there is an initiative from the Girl herself. Irritation about crying has been transformed into self-appointed pacifier duty: “When he spits it out, I’ll get it!” she proclaims.
And of course she’s just dying to hold him.
It's not that we don't remember the sleepless nights and days that blur one into another, the perpetual exhaustion to the point of aches and pains, the little prayers one mutters when the baby begins stirring, the half-awake-half-asleep state of being that can linger for hours, the thought that just an hour of solid sleep would be worth a four-figure sum. We don't forget it. We just forget what it feels like.
The correlative of this is the desperation one feels to make sure that the child sleeps any chance and place possible.
Note: at least one photo staged...
Sometimes it’s best for the Boy to sit up a bit as he sleeps — much like the Girl was.
Hardly a substitute.
The birth of our son today leads to thoughts of matters of significance: of the miracles and improbabilities of love and life; of the cosmic scope of unbounded affection and the microscopic details it discovers; of the sweetness of sacrifice for sweetness; of the paradox of pain in beauty and beauty in pain; of phlegm and blood and the sacred oils of life; of the indescribable perfume of a newborn and the musicality of his cry; of the promise of motets, poems, and equations that threads through a life from the moment of conception; of the paradox that one plus one equals one, two, four, or more; of the perfect symmetry of our asymmetrical familial lives; of a softness too delicate to believe and too tough to be broken; of the illogical logic of a mother’s love; of trust and patience and a million other things that shouldn’t exist in a purely material world; of souls and blessings and angels; and of a father’s circular reasoning.
There are biological and anthropological explanations for all this. Studies of nature show we are unnaturally natural and naturally unnatural, that we have the same codes at the heart of our being as chimps and many of the same behaviors circling out from that almost-identical genetic blueprint. Physics and astronomy combine with chemistry to form a foundation for a biological explanation for why I would fight to the death for my son, daughter, and wife, but even the most elaborate string theory or quantum physics can make sense of it, can discover why I should, can illuminate the goodness of altruism.
And so I am left in a chilly room with an exhausted wife and a swaddled son, an energetic daughter bouncing from idea to idea with grandparents who can only try to keep up, and the realization that at the heart of it, the mystery of this all is what must be at the start and finish of any human endeavor. Mystery is the thread through our lives that strings together all our happy accidents and makes continuity out of chaos. Mystery, in the form of love, is the thread that makes embroidery out of our lives, but someone must be pulling on the needle.
Ten pounds, five ounces.