Baby

There's a baby in my lap. By some strange convergence of biological and physical coincidences, this tiny bundle of heat and squirm is my son. Many, many people have written very coherently about becoming parents, and I don't feel very coherent at this point. (I'm sure this has something to do with a general shift in sleeping habits, combined with a transitional event so physically traumatizing that I can only remember it in poorly-lit slideshow flashes.) Nevertheless, I'm sitting here listening to some piano music, watching my son sleep in my lap, and I want to put together letters and words in some way that makes sense of the developing paradigm shift. It's a little like trying to put together a puzzle in a dream: the pieces all look familiar, but their borders have changed and they seem to have constantly changing images within them.

And I know that when I try to describe this to anyone else, in the manner of all dreams it will sound like a mishmash of blurry and impossible impressions linked together by nonsensical leaps of logic.

He is limp with sleep. His arms are draped haphazardly over each other. Sometimes something startles him, and he shoves his tiny hands into the air like Frankenstein's monster, but he doesn't wake up.

Then he does, after a while, and he starts to make these ridiculous little movements. His dad calls them "controlled chaos." He waggles his head from side to side with increasing vehemence, like a progressively intoxicated jilted man telling the bartender, "No, man, you don't understand, we were perfect for each other, and one day I woke up and she was gone. It's just not fair." Which is probably a fair representation of what's going through his head, except that she here is my breast. After a little bit, he gets tired of the drunken head shaking. Instead, he progresses to open-mouthed head-butting of whatever is anywhere near his face. Eventually, between the two of us, we get him fed, and he returns to floppy-boned unconsciousness.

Look, no one said week-old babies led wild lives of excitement and whirlwind thrill-seeking.

He is a week old. That's wild all by itself.

We've spent the last seven days being entirely about something external to ourselves. Someone external to ourselves. It's simultaneously exhausting and somewhat freeing. (This is possibly the only time in my life I've ever so thoroughly agreed with someone I mostly know by how often I see his face on supermarket magazines, but I think he put it pretty well. I, too, get pretty tired of being so self-focused. I'm sure I'll get frustrated with not being able to pay attention to my own needs often, too, but right now it's pretty refreshing.) He's so very small, and so very fragile, and so very determined, and so soft!

The cat, by the way, is predictably unimpressed with this larval thing that cannot perform basic tasks like putting kibbles in her dish or opening the porch door for her. She's also substantially bigger than he is. How is that possible?

When I was very small, although not as small as our son is, and firmly in my scientist-performs-all-the-experiments-even-the-stupidly-obvious-ones phase, I decided to find out what would happen if I were to take a pair of pliers and apply them to my stomach. As you might expect, this did not result in happy times for 小玲玲. To my misfortune the pliers were the kind that locked in place. The incident left a scar shaped like a butterfly just below my xiphoid process, right over my solar plexus.

Our son has a mark just between his eyebrows, probably from the forceps, that looks just like that butterfly.

I can no longer see my own butterfly. It's underneath the first tattoo I ever got, thirteen years ago. The stylized picture of a tree with a knothole showing through to concentric rings that twine between the branches. People ask me why I got that specific image tattooed on me. "It's a reminder," I've always said. "A reminder to stay open and keep growing."

I can't think of better advice I could have given myself as a new parent, from thirteen years in the past, than that.