It
has been just over six weeks since I gave birth to my daughter, and, whenever
she is peacefully napping, I find myself thinking, how have I not written about
childbirth and being a parent yet? Then, at the same time, I think, how could I
possibly write about those things? I don’t mean how could I find the time,
although, I will admit there is very little of it between all of the feeding,
cuddling, crying, diaper changing, and general attempts to maintain a semblance
of normalcy in my home and life. As tiny as my daughter is, she has changed
everything in my life, but I have never been happier. What I mean is that
having a baby is the most amazing experience I have ever had in my life. It has
swallowed me whole, and I am immersed in the experience while staring at it
overwhelmed and awe-inspired from inside my own head. I am in it and consumed
by it, like the quotidian sublime of the ocean or never ending fields in the
Midwest. It is something that happens everyday, and, yet, it is one of the
greatest things a human being can experience. While I can write about the
details, tell you everything that has happened and even fit it into a swell
narrative arc, I can’t quite find the words to describe the experience as a
whole, an experience that is greater than me. It is like trying to describe the
ocean to someone who has never seen it before. It is blue, it smells salty, and
any list of descriptive details could be used, but the details don’t quite cut
it. You can’t quite understand until you see it for yourself because it isn’t
just each sensory detail that adds up to make the thing, it is the experience.
You realize this
when you become a parent. You think back to all of those times you rolled your
eyes at your parents for worrying about you when you didn’t call or came home
late. You finally feel what they felt, this all embracing feeling of love, a
love that must worry and protect. You finally feel what it is like to want the
very best for someone and to know in your heart that you will do anything to
give your child that. Everything that your parents have done and continue to do
for you becomes illuminated, and you begin to understand that you were probably
right to adore them as a child and look at them as superheroes. They are
superheroes. Every parent should be their child’s superhero. And, if you have
friends who had children before you, you know you have heard them say all of
this, there is nothing else like it, it is the most amazing experience in the
world, I wouldn’t change it for anything. And you nodded, and you believed
them, but you didn’t really understand, you can’t really understand, until it
happens to you.
But, while it may
seem impossible to write about this experience, it isn’t. It just takes finding
the right moments and describing the perfect mix of details about those
moments. There is no recipe, but it can be done. That is the challenge of a
writer. You have to write about those tiny, poignant moments when you felt most
deeply. Of course, you can’t live every moment like that or you would probably
melt into a puddle on the floor, unable to function as an adult. Believe me, this has happened to me. So, instead of feeling everything all the time, we let those moments
flutter into our lives and we never forget them. We return to them when the pain or mundanity of life has made us feel numb. Those are the poignant moments
we write about. I can think of no better place to start then when the nurses
placed my daughter on my chest for the first time, she began to nurse, and I
stared at her tiny hands and full head of brown hair. A smile burst on my face
and I couldn’t stop looking at her. Despite all the commotion around me and the
doctor sewing me up, there was nothing else in the room for me at that moment
except for my daughter and me, dissolved into happiness.
