Transition

I put off parenthood for a long time. Aside from the standard need to get established in the world, followed by finding the right person to breed with, there exists other internal resistance to parenthood. However, the desire for something new breached the egocentric levee with no dutch boy to plug the dyke.

Having a baby stretches my ego the same way a new yoga pose expands muscles long contracted. No longer am I in the spotlight of my own life, instead I'm sharing it with a egocentric human fragment. As my mother's life before me was merely a conceptual haze, so must mine be to Sebastian. Photos of parents, their stories and past couldn't be possible, as the child wasn't there to witness it. My mother exists as only my mother, having been delivered as an adult the same time as me. A picture of her graduating high school seems like a film still. She beams from behind her cat-eye glasses, topped off with the bouffant hair, so eager to go off to college. No, my mother was born with long straight hair and hippy clothes. I Look at Sebastian, and my own photos, my own life fades and discolors. Photos of enchanted college years crystallize; the magical moments dulling into a display of funny clothes and odd choices of interior design.

The child in me wants to scream at him, to validate her experiences: there were times without cell phones, tablet computers and cable TV. In college, I inked letters, stamped them and mailed them to my high school friends. During my year in Italy, I had no email. The world changed and I was a part of it.

My thirteen pound baby absorbs the spotlight and leaves me in the shadows. He now dictates my outfits (nursing tops), when I sleep (when he does), when I change clothes (when they are soaked by baby effluence), what I eat (5-7 servings of organic fruits & veg), what I do drink (water) and what I do not (caffeine & excessive amounts of alcohol). I cannot let him out of my sight without first finding someone else to mind him. No longer will I be running off to the circus or Ibiza or the store without thinking of what will happen to Baz.

Magic moments come when he smiles and sleeps. It took 36 years to get my life just right. The right job, the right income, the resources to do what I wanted when I wanted to do it. I finally sated the child in me. Now I've got the child outside of me to sate.