Babies!

Decades ago, friends of ours told a story of driving across the middle of Canada for what seemed like days, twin newborn babies in two car seats, their (overwhelmingly jealous) 18-month-old daughter in the back seat between them. As the road went on and on, the little girl became increasingly angry about the cries of the babies, then the attention and time given to them. 

She began to poke them. One after the other, back and forth, she poked, creating more stops, more needs, more chaos as the babies wailed. Finally, Dad tied the toddler's hands down under her legs, so she couldn't poke. 
 
All was quiet for about 2 minutes...until she began leaning over to first one baby, then the other hissing, 
"Babies!" "Babies!" "Babies!" "Babies!" More startling, more newborn wails.

Half of the Canadian prairie to go....

Eventually, Dad got out of the car, put his hands on the hood and his head down, and shouted his own angst out to the prairie grasses.

The story has always caught in my mind with laughter to the point of tears, and then just tears, as a painful picture of traumatic parenting life and trauma-causing coping mechanisms - and such a lost opportunity for comforting this little girl and helping her towards what she really needed. 

I hope she has been able to love babies, and even those two, in the many years since then.

One of my favorite things on the world is having the sole and holy job of being with a baby. All I have to do is watch, lying on a bed in a warm place, holding in a blanket, seeing what she sees and creating a place, helping her be more herself in it. 

She’s waking up: is she waking up hungry? Help her wake up happily so she can eat without being frantic. Or help her wake up eating, so she knows her needs will be met.

Is he waking up easily? Be in his face so his first experience is human and building those brain cells and neural pathways that say “I am connected and loved.” Or let him wake up in his skin and know that the light and blowing clouds are his world.

Does he wake up slowly? Help him move loved from dreamland, or nightmares, into the world. 

And the real world comes in, with days-long car trips, harried grocery runs, all-night crying, eternal diapers. And the wrestle back to peace for parent and child happens, eventually.

Our privilege is to see who they are and help form their loves, habits, and understandings.  It has been the joy of my life to have the chance to inhabit this space for the ten years of my own four babies, and now occasionally with some of theirs.

The successes are tangible & brief, and they are lifelong and into another generation of life.

The diaper is dry and a sufficient nap is complete. Good and satisfying.

Joyful: she is grown, and she is growing a love of words and wonder in her students. 

Those things that feel like failure, yes.

She rolled off the bed onto a wooden floor under my watch.

His intuitive understanding of love in the cosmos feels skewed, also under my watch.

The joys and the sorrows are soul-deep.

In those deeps I can swim with the light and unbearable fleetingness of sunshine on hair, warm babies in arms, his first-ever laugh and her 1,002nd laugh, the heart-breaking truth about Santa Claus, the heart-bursting discovery of a butterfly on a flower. 

I can think of nothing else in my life that I would choose to do, or do over, than this.