I wasn't prepared for this

You love your friends and what matters to them matters to you, so of course you say yes when they invite you to come see their newborn baby. Of course. Over to the hospital you go. I am privileged to not be so familiar with these places but I recognize the elevator, the doors that open at the push of a button, the hallways that project medical ability, biological stability, hope’s reliability. Then into the room. Into her room.

And there she is. In her artificial womb of plexiglass and portals, wires and cables to monitors and screens, heartbeat over respiration over oxygen saturation and there is no normal but this one as you listen to the beep of alarm and watch it come back down to green before you breathe again.

Truth be told, promise not to tell? I generally think babies are kinda ugly. Amphibian creatures barely sapiens, born from a woman they promise but I’m tempted to look around for the spaceship retreating.

But this? This tiny person, swimming through the unfamiliar space of her newborn body, premature and perfect, this little girl is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. And I scorn the scorn that whispers at the cliche because bugger me but it’s true.

And I don’t know what to say. She’s magnificent.

I’ve felt this way before, witnessing the small ones of kith and kin. Stood abashed before the splendor of creation. And I well remember the transcendent majesty of looking at my lady love’s son and feeling the gods’ gift of realizing “Yes, yes, for this I would die to protect.” And he wasn’t even mine.

And suddenly, on a normal Saturday night I’m feeling it again, the awe, the sheer dumbfounded reverence for what it is to bring a child into this world. Tomorrow I’ll rage at the idiocy that brings violence to remove them, as everyone is a child in someone’s heart, but for now I exist in little besides awe.

I am accustomed to seeing the Divine in Nature, the pulse of the universe in ocean waves, sand dune shifts, and sunlight through the leaves, but here I am in a concrete cave made by men and everywhere I look I see godliness. In the purpose of the space, the quiet skill and sleepless devotion of the staff, the faceless researchers who devise the tests and cures, and above all else: her, and the indomitability of her will to continue. What is god if not this newest person? Why would it be anywhere else?

Outside it’s a normal night. Cars each going to their own someplace, sports fans ribbing at each others laundry, friends talking too loudly on the lamplit street with words about nothing that manifest their love anyway. And it is a normal night. Another in the endless line of nights where somewhere nearby a miracle is breathing. And the awe overtakes me. I was ready to meet their child, but I was not prepared for this.

A tangible reason to care about the future. In San Diego.

San Diego is paisley from above. Curls and loops and whorls of housing developments; conceived at desks, proposed in meetings, and built by contract. All those lives, churning away down there, unknowable, each ostensibly unique, yet seemingly interchangeable through an airplane’s porthole window.

One of those roofs, somewhere in the pattern, shelters my brother, his wife, and the newest bodacious audacity in my familial web: a niece. The niece. The first, perhaps the only, member of our next genetic generation; our reach for eternity; our most tangible reason to care about the future.

The niece

I’ve met enough of our multicrazy species to know that not everyone actually likes their siblings; blessed to genuinely like all four of mine, it feels like a waste not to take advantage of this fact. So as I caught the 992 bus at the airport, transferred to the trolley among beach boys in flip flops and Navy men in spotless dress uniforms, and disembarked in their neighborhood, my enthusiasm was tripartite at the upcoming reunion with a brother and dual introductions, to a new sister and a new baby.

Oh baby, the baby. What is it about babies?

I don’t personally plan to spawn, but that doesn’t mean I am blind to the sacred burble of the baby. I adore those soft tiny creatures, with their jiggly focus and massive craniums. To be in the presence of an organism with its whole life ahead of it is a reminder to love your own days, and to witness the curiosity that knows only relentlessness and insatiability, that exists in a state of genius-level observation, processing, and adaptation, is to have first row seats to Potential.

The niece is teething

Plus their laughs are like Christmas presents a week early; unexpected and pure.

I arrived just after midday in the vigorous San Diego sun, and my brother informed me that things were good, and/but that the wee one had gone down for the night at….10:00 that morning.

Oy. No, no plans to spawn.

But soon she was awake, all bright eyes and damn-bursting grins. Then she was sitting on my arm, a finite package filled with infinite meaning. Looking down into those eyes, I could immediately feel the compulsion to put this creature’s welfare before my own, to undergo hardship and do uncountable things, so that she might have the best life possible.

The niece flies

I can’t imagine what it is to be a parent. Terrifying and glorious. And utterly exhausting, down to the particles of fear, hope, and dedication that fill a parental bloodstream of anemic steel, worn out and indefatigable both.

The niece and me

Three days and one wedding later; one more sibling’s partner wholeheartedly welcomed to my family affection; and caffeinated with enthusiasm for The Niece, I again rose over the paisley whorls of San Diego. I still couldn’t tell you which roof was theirs, but knowing the treasure that lives below it, I couldn’t help but smile at all of them.

First week of teacher training

Tuesday October 4 – Taking the train home after Day 1 of teacher training, pulling into the station at Brussels North past shy behemoths of office towers loitering outside the station, waiting tragically for some executive to come make them feel loved.  Their profane expanses of reflective glass look best when punctured and shattered in the post-apocalyptic cityscape; it will take the end of the world as we know it to make them interesting.  I mean that in a good-natured way.  Those institutions are not a means for the growth of human happiness and wellbeing. I promise I’m not listening to Marilyn Manson and wearing big black boots with lots of buckles right now.

Class was a pleasant event.  Looks like work, and that’s a good thing.  Looks like quality people, and that’s a great thing.  My online TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) class was too easy/boring/non-practical, and learning is always worthwhile.

Cruising above traffic-constipated highways in a train that hums in a language fluent in speed is just plain fun.

Wednesday October 5 – I screwed up my demo lesson in class today worse than I’ve ever screwed anything up.  It was even worse than that time in freshman year of college when I didn’t prepare a Spanish presentation on Sor Juana based on prior “knowledge” of a book I (didn’t) read for another class, and tried to stretch the statement “Sor Juana was a nun” into a 5 minute presentation.

Luckily it was the best possible scenario for a failure, with an instructor who can frame it as a mixed bag, and a class who can benefit from it as a learning experience.  It wasn’t just me who flailed, it was us who learned…  Though it just felt like me at the time.

I spent the next couple hours uncomfortable and tongue-tied.

The commute-time train is full of businessmen in their fresh black/navy blue suits; the air smells like a clothing store, not real life, and has a unique hush of lots of people uninterested in talking to each other, or maybe they’re just as tired as I am.

A woman who looks like Joe Torre with greasy hair to her chin reads a famous Dan Brown novel on a platform as we slide past, standing apart from the businessmen.  She doesn’t look up as we pass by.  Neither do they.

The graffiti is scattered politely across warehouse sides and farm field fences, colorful, legible, and uninspired.  I’ve never tried that, seems like it would be fun.  Maybe if this teaching gig doesn’t work out, I’ll give it a try…  Your homework: tag 5 Starbucks.  Starbuckses.

Thursday October 6 – The vagaries of human ebb + flow reliably defy comprehension and stubbornly exist, so I’m the only one to get off the train at my small station today, and I ride home in a patiently-complacently peaceful suburban silence, luckily with Chet Baker’s Almost Blue in my ears.  In a backyard glimpsed between brick houses made entirely of 90-degree angles I see a brightly colored pinwheel spinning-shouting over bulgy plastic yard toys abandoned on their sides.  It is the only motion, outside my own, in a world that has been eaten by long work hours and television.  The former has relinquished its hold for the day, and the people have embraced the anaesthetic of the latter, which blink idiotically through window after window.

It’s a zombie movie, and I’m the only survivor of the plague, only the monsters refuse to leave their houses.

Friday October 7 – I can’t quite tell if I’m exhausted or eager in class, I think both.  All I know is a very unexpected degree of nervousness.  I’m uncomfortable in my own skin like I haven’t been since adolescence.

I’ve gotten off planes with no idea what to expect on 4 continents, and it never felt like this.

I find myself in a state of witness, detached, that I associate with physical danger.  When the infamous California riptide is keeping me away from the beach, and my limbs are getting sluggish in the cold.  Walking alone through a jungle that shivers in the rain to look for a rhino that the guide said was here before he disappeared, and my own feet look so small when I step in the tracks of the animal that could be behind any bush.  Walking, alone alone, through an unknown city at night where I know no words in the language and no people in the country and have no place to sleep tonight and am 90% sure those guys from the alley are following me now.  Walking alone alone alone through a village that seems abandoned other than the half dozen dogs who are surrounding me in growls and barking.

Those all felt fun, my heart smiling as it beat faster.  This classroom detachment is more like nausea.  Logically I find it unwarranted.

In the crowded train station I play the familiar game of trying to spot the pick-pockets among the crowd, college kids heading home with bags of laundry, and the businessmen with panic around their eyes as they negotiate sanity in an existence where they look forward to Friday all week, then get here and realize it’s just waiting in mild annoyance for Monday morning, when they’ll settle back to complaining about work with a sigh of relief.

(Oh, and that one businessman whose pants are way-hay-hay too tight.  Maybe he’s Italian…)

But that’s not quite right, I don’t feel anger or depression at these facefree hordes with briefcases in hand, instead I feel empathy and respect for the tragic and unimaginable sacrifices made with varying degrees of willingness to a system of profane selfishness, desperate need, and idiotic exigencies.  I wonder what the smiling poverty of Nepal would say on this subterranean platform.

But riding home I am filled with a screaming love for the world that wants to caress and smash the lot of it.  I love my fellow man but he needs a kick in the pants and a hug.

Saturday October 8 – When I heard it was a two week training, I kinda dismissed it; how much can you expect to learn in two weeks?  I am surprised at how tiring it is, especially when logically I understand it all, but just can’t manoeuvre it into anything functional.  But enough is enough for now, so I spent Saturday without a thought for this job, instead trying to catch up with the world through the forum of an email each to my mother and brother, and 64 emails of political/environmental/social causes and newsletters.  There are amazing and horrible things going on every damn blessed day.


My Saturday was with two of the amazing things.

Welcome to the world, little one.

What a remarkable day.  Yes, every day is remarkable, but today was different, for one glaringly obvious reason.  Today was little Ella's birthday.  As in day of birth, as in today.  K’s goddaughter, and the tiniest little puckered fruit of beautiful I have ever seen, Ella joined the world at quarter after ten o’clock this morning.

There is nothing quite like holding a newborn baby.  That squishy little bundle of unimaginable preciousness.  The pure hugeness of what she has to learn, has to see, has to experience in this rattling world.  She hadn’t even seen night yet!  She is a little bundle of semi-awareness, her sensations and emotions pure of words, expressions cross her tiny face that has absolutely no sense of itself.

What an unimaginably precious thing that is.

What an incomprehensible responsibility, for the parents, for the family, for the peers, for the world.

How can humans do the horrible things some of them do, when each of us was like that at the beginning?  And how wonderful that other humans (most of the first ones too) do the wonderful things for each other that they do!

How wonderful that this soul was born here, today.  This place, this family.  What a mind-bending case of luck, that she came into a loving family that wants and supports her, while so many others are born into so much less…

I only have two other experiences of holding a newborn baby, and to be honest the second one is somewhat vague in my mind.  But I remember that first one, and I remember looking down at this creature and knowing without a doubt that I am on his side.  That he can call on me for anything, and if it’s in my power, it’s his.  It was true that day and it’s still true today.

I felt that same way today, for this new soul.

What an incredible gift that is.  To feel a dedication that is totally uncomplicated.

The love of a parent must, by necessity, be a more powerful and more complicated thing.  I am still not planning on ever becoming a parent myself, but today I feel absolutely blessed to have held that tiny, vulnerable body with it’s invincible, precious soul and known that feeling.