The World Was Meant For You and Me

After Scarlet was born, I didn’t get why people said to “Enjoy it – it goes so fast.” Oh no, time wasn’t liquid to me then – flowing through against my will. Rather it was like a sticky almost-solid, slowly dripping down and out, one thick droplet at a time. After Des was born, I was in shock for ages, to be two weeks postpartum, and then it was two months, and even two years, since I had given birth, and it felt like both a wink and an eternity. And speaking of winking..

I’m still in disbelief to have done it again; to be here. It’s a little like the old place and a lot like the new place. Every baby is different, and every me is different. The time is different – with political tension at an all-time high and the amazingly insane pandemic. It’s worse than ever, and yet vaccine and treatment research is better than ever. I’m in complete disbelief to be here, and to be surrounded by people who think SO differently from me regarding pandemic safety, and elections, and yet here we are. It feels like a dream, but also a beautiful and vivid dream.

He has entire quiet days, and entire quiet(ish) nights, so colic isn’t a factor. Yet when this kid gets his scream on, I have never heard such impressive baby lungs. And it changes, as does he. All along, it was him. All of the fears and the twinges; the slight nausea and the discomfort. The excitement and the anxiety and the ultrasounds and the conversations and the tears and the laughter. All along, it was him. One of a thousand beautiful things, but really, he is a thousand beautiful things. All at once and spread out for blinks and eons. You can focus on one each day, or each minute. A longer than the others eyelash. A falsetto cry. Little whimpers and whines and different kinds of smiles, especially the ones in which he doesn’t realize he’s doing it. He doesn’t fully grasp that he knows how to do it. That’s how it comes, like a thousand beautiful things.

Still, I’m so surprised to be seven weeks postpartum which is a drop in the water, and an eon. Never let people tell you that time is fast when you think it’s moving slowly. It’s hard to imagine I will ever bounce back from the whiplash of the last several months. I was sick in January and I went to Florida and I was sick in Florida and no one is ever sick in Florida, or at least had I thought so. I came back here healthier, and found out I was pregnant within days. A few weeks later, COVID-19 shut down our world. So we’re all just catching up; a little breathless, and in wonder and horror and awe and discomfort. It’s just all there twisting and swirling around.

Sometimes it’s so hard to bond with him, because of nursing problems and the physical pain when I hold him against me, and sometimes it’s so hard to not bond with him, because of his soulful newness/amazingness and the emotional pain when I am not holding him against me.

Sometimes, he’s 7-weeks-old and sometimes he seems six-months-old, because he’s tall and alert, and because we’re all of us 7-weeks-old and six-months-old and 40-years-old and 100-years-old. Timeless and ageless, stretching and shrinking, all of us a thousand beautiful things.

And that’s why I can wallow slowly and a bit painfully in these long and uncertain and dreary days, while also feeling panicked at time passing by at warp speed. We’re all of us in this – finding the good in ourselves, and finding it in one another. And I don’t want to miss a second, you see, of his lightning fast changes and leaps and milestones. His hand outstretched; long fingers unfurling and conjuring magic like Doctor Strange. I reach out my fingers in the dark, fumbling, and finding my hand in his bassinet. A tiny hand wraps around my finger. Contact. Each of us always reassuring one another of our presence in the darkness. It’s always been there.