The Idea of You: Part 1
Month 1: Who Are You?
I don’t know who you are, but I love you.
That’s without conditions and without pretense. You’re at once half your mother and half me, but all your own. What a miraculous thing.
You’re a cluster of cells right now. I might have enough fingers and toes to count them all. But already you have changed me. You have made me appreciate multitudes of moments and possibilities that I have taken for granted.
On a superficial level, I’ve thought about all that must happen for a human life to begin. But the dangers and odds have never been so visceral. Every ache and pain your mother verbalizes sets off an alarm in me. But how can I save something the size of a grain of sand? Even now, before you're born, you must find your own way.
Already, you strike me as a paradox -- and I love a good paradox. You’re at once explained by biological processes, and unexplainable. I’ve never encountered such a beautiful idea.
For example, the moment you were conceived, your sex was determined. Your mother and I won’t know that for a few months to come. You hold all of the cards. You contain mysteries ancient and new. And you haven’t even seen daylight!
I know that in the weeks since your conception, this idea of you came to possess an epiblast and a hypoblast, which would further differentiate by cell division to form your skin, your nervous system, your organs. And yet all of these things and these actions are merely parts of you. This thing I think of as you, this miracle, this paradox, will be something new to me each day from the moment you’re born until the day I die.
Wild. So punk rock.
Maybe I’ll spend the next 70 years of my life waking up each day and saying, I don’t know who you are, but I love you. That’s something I can get used to.
Month 2: Not Knowing
You have no idea how woefully unprepared I am for you. Don’t get me wrong, I’m trying. Believe me, I’m trying -- for you and your mother. That’s all I can do. Put in an honest effort. But never have I known how much I don’t know more than right now.
This is probably a distortion of memory, but from the moment we confirmed your existence, I started studying.
Your mother was in the bathroom outside of my office, peeing on a piece of plastic. And I was at the controls, making paragraphs. I heard her start to cry and I got up and I held her while she said, between what she called overwhelmed tears, she was pregnant.
I had that moment, and believe me, it was about a moment, because Fred called.
You’re going to love Fred. He’s like your great-grandfather Joe, who, unfortunately, you’ll never meet. I often imagine Joe and Fred sitting in some dimly lit Manhattan bar, talking about Chaucer or Roth or Updike, drinking too much too fast, and it fills my heart with almost as much joy as thinking of you.
You see, it was perfect that Fred called right in that moment. It was like your great grandfather was reaching through from the afterlife to absorb some of the joy. In fact, I almost told Fred, reflexively, then and there. But some lucid fragment of reason staid my tongue and I didn’t. We discussed whatever was top of mind with his new novel, and then we parted.
And I returned to a moment that I have yet to leave. This moment of anticipation, nervousness, not knowing. I held your mother again and felt like gravity had gotten a bit stronger. I started looking for books to read and started reading that day.
I know all about counter pressure, the merits of using a doula, the benefits of breastfeeding, the circumcision debate (if this applies to you), various presentations of vaginal birth, frightening conditions, home birth, etc. This is all necessary information. But it strikes me that I am no closer to knowing you. And I won’t be for years.
Maybe being a parent is stepping into a place of not-knowing. It’s a leap into some primordial darkness. I suppose people make that leap consciously or unconsciously, but it’s a leap just the same. No books can replace the value of direct transmission, of experience.
When I think of you now, I realize that I must open myself fully to the experience of you becoming you. I must know this ultimate not-knowing.
Month 3: Alive
In a time-faded office, lined with Christmas cards and graying paintings, I heard your heartbeat. One-hundred and fifty beats per minute. A punk-rock tempo. The sound rattled tinny through the fetal doppler, like cymbals crashing on the other side of a wall.
A-live. A-live. A-live. A-live. A-live. A-live. A-live. A-live.
You were conceived in a deadly time, and already you’re affirming the wildness and boundlessness of life. We need more of that spirit right now, and that’s precisely why your mother and I chose to bring you into this world. You are our hope for a better future made flesh. I believe you and your generation will do a much better job than ours, but only if we teach you well, only if we lay our own demons to rest, first.
This all sounds pessimistic, but it isn’t. You are an affirmation of undying optimism.
You have a friend named Violet on the other side of the country. She’ll be a year older than you, by the time you arrive. Her father is like a brother to me. He and I were out walking along the coast when he told me that Violet was on the way, and I watched the light in his eyes grow brighter when he told me about the great things he knew she would do, the potential for change, the boundlessness of life.
My brother’s words, I understood them intellectually, but it’s since become more of a felt, heart-centered sense of knowing. I really know it now because I heard it in your heartbeat. You, Violet, the friends you’ll make in your long life: You are our better world made flesh.
It makes my heart swell. I will do all that I can to help you, but know that you have already helped me. I’m still listening.
A-live. A-live. A-live. A-live. A-live. A-live. A-live. A-live.