This return to normalcy sets me up for surprise when I read reports that people are dead. With unsinkable buoyancy, normalcy resurfaces. The blue sky pushes their fury aside and re-asserts its casual sovereignty. They muster all they have and blow themselves out in twenty-four hours, like panting sprinters doubled over after fifty meters. Impressive as storms are, they cannot match the staying power of pleasant weather. Floodwaters rise to the second stories of buildings, and cars float in the street, but a day or two later, the ground is dry, the sun is out, and the world is as it was. ![]() When a hurricane strikes a coastline, and I follow its onset and aftermath on the news, I am struck by the brevity of the event. Why pore through parenting books as if a child's development hinged chiefly on our methods? Overzealous parents are like software managers who don't know how to program yet think projects will fail unless they tinker with the few superficial details they understand. We provide milk and play mats and cribs for naps, and out of these raw materials our babies assemble brains, speech, movement, emotions, and consciousness. We parents are mere managers, facilitating rather than performing the critical work. I am installing gates to keep our daughter from tumbling down the stairs, but she is mysteriously engineering her own ability to crawl. ![]() My wife in pregnancy, though I honor her suffering, was more acted upon than acting, a Petri dish for our fused cells to grow in. True, my wife had to carry our child for nine months, and together we must guide and raise her for eighteen years, but these are outward and trivial aids. It takes me months to write an essay it took minutes to create my daughter. Meanwhile, in all our other endeavors, we work much harder to produce a far less impressive result. ![]() Imagine, too, the soul's alienation when, the veil of mortality lifted, it beholds God and discovers that the God it loved in life was only a fantasy, and it must now learn to love all over again.īy pleasure rather than labor, by release rather than exertion, we create life. I've sometimes felt a milder version of this estrangement from expectation when arriving at a vacation rental that I had visualized incorrectly based on photographs. How could this be my daughter, my dearest, the flesh of my flesh, when I could not have told her apart from a total stranger? I had loved my mental idea of her, talking to her through my wife's skin during pregnancy, but now her reality and particularity said to me, slow down with your love, I am not made in your mental image. Though I had no real expectation of what she would look like, her unfamiliar appearance startled me by reminding me that I did not know her yet. Looking past her disheveled condition at her face, I saw no resemblance to my wife or me. She entered life a rough-looking creature: her skin was covered with a white film, her wet black hair was matted to her head, and her right ear, the first feature I saw, was so crumpled from delivery that I briefly thought she had cauliflower ear. ![]() Though I loved my daughter before she was born and very soon afterward, surprise, not love, was my chief emotion as the doctor pulled her from the birth canal.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |