Change

I was feeling down the other day and realized I was sad because she is changing. She used to be small and still, just present, and with me. She has now emerged from the larval stage to become this totally hyperactive squawking, bobbling, wriggling, scooting thing. She sounds like a noisy seagull and moves like a paralytic determined to drag herself around by the arms. She’s less helpless, more willful. And I sort of miss the way she used to be.

D thinks I’ve gone off my rocker. He says he’s always loved her, but now he’s starting to really like her, now she’s getting more interesting and being her own person. Before she was this thing that cried and pooped. Now she laughs and babbles and squeals when we come in the room. She waves at us (and inanimate objects and total strangers) and shares her pacifier (takes it out, turns it around and jams it into our mouths).

She also likes, curiously, to pick at my teeth, carefully feeling each one with utter seriousness. I complain about feeling like a horse at the market or someone at the dentist’s, but secretly I sort of like it.

I’ve finally weaned her, a process which felt surprisingly natural, but which may be contributing to this sense of basic separation. I look back now, and the last nine months seem a gift, an extension of the first nine months she was inside me, when we basically just connected and hung out together.

It’s good to identify this, because it helps me be thankful and move on. They say it’s normal to grieve when you wean. It’s natural she’s changing, and a good reminder that she was always her own person. It’s okay to miss the old baby while I learn how to be with the new one—think of new foods to try, new games to play, new books to read or ways for her to explore the world. This is part of what it is to parent, I guess, to always be changing and learning. Or maybe, I think to myself, I’ll just have another baby.

Journal Excerpt

On a picture board near the nursery door we put up baby pictures of D and I, at the time because I thought it would be interesting to see who our baby looked like, though it’s now a mute point because she looks so much like D that he calls her his twin. There’s a picture of me looking fat and complacent with my hair sticking up while sitting up next to a series of obviously-posed stuffed animals, on a very 1980’s bedspread. There’s a picture of D standing up holding on to the edge of his playpen, a huge grin on his face.

I noticed she seemed really interested in the pictures, always craning her body and trying to crawl out of my arms in that direction. So I held her up to them today. She slowly extended her hand out, then started to wave it back and forth gently while staring at the pictures, as if to say hello, or goodbye. That’s mommy when she was your age, I told her. That one there’s daddy. She stopped waving, looked serious, then stretched out her hand and waved again.

Little Ones

I can barely keep up with her these days. I get tired just watching her, because she never stops MOVING. She twists, turns, rolls. She scoots her way along the ground like a lizard, or like a little crippled person. She has an amazing reach. I’ll think, good thing that’s out of the way, and then the next minute it’s in her mouth. I think part of this is her truly impossible degree of flexibility. Holding her feels like grasping a wriggling eel; she’s always twisting around to get or look at something of interest. Items of interest, in case anyone is Christmas shopping early, would probably rank:

1. Paper, particularly tags.
2. Keys (real ones; I bought her a set of fake plastic ones but she has no interest).
3. Anything that is going in my mouth.
4. The cat’s tails.
5. Anything she can tear cheerfully apart into little pieces, like tissues or flowers.

I think sometimes about all that she doesn’t understand, and it blows my mind. She doesn’t understand that when she rips a tulip apart, it is destroyed. That when she drops things, someone has to pick it up. She has absolutely no sense of self-preservation; that it might not be good to reach for something sharp or lean too far over the edge of a bed. She has absolutely no idea how much we do to keep her well.

It makes me think about my relationship with God in a new way. When I think of God as my father, it’s mostly in the way my father was to me as an older child and adult. I don’t remember much of anything before I was five. But surely God is also a father to me the way we are to E now. I get a glimpse of what the psalmist meant when he wrote that God’s ways and understanding are higher than ours. He sees the things I do that no one else notices. He understands the bigger picture, the purpose behind events, in a way beyond my usual thinking. He provides and is alongside me even when I take it for granted.

And in the end, he loves me. I think about how Jesus said to let the little children come to him, little babies like E who are too young to understand many things, to know how to act. I think about how much I love her despite and because of all that. And I’m a little closer to understanding how God loves me.

Journal Excerpt

She is teething, and with a vengeance. That little bud that appeared and disappeared last December was definitely a fake-out; THESE are teeth, these wide white ridges rearing up from her ridgy gums.

We take our teeth for granted. I’ve learned to maneuver my mouth so I don’t bite my tongue or cheek; so my teeth don’t get in the way of my mouth closing; so they process food efficiently. I’ve learned to make them part of my sounds, of my language and my smile. She hasn’t done any of that. I hear her grinding her upper one against her two lower ones when she doesn’t think I’m listening, as if experimenting.

It must be a rather painful exercise, this bone bursting from flesh. When else does a whole new part of our bodies grow in? It’s as if we grew a third arm one painful joint at a time and then had to learn how to use it. Look, you’ll be happy you have them, I tell her. And I’ll love you the same even if you only have these three crooked-looking ones.

Complacency and Purpose

I've been reading an excellent book by John Piper called "Don't Waste Your Life." Last night, I finally got to the meat of his message: forget entertainment, appearance, and all this other hoopla -- make your life count by screwing the world, screwing what other people think, and following Jesus! How else will you be able to stand before God and look back on your life without regret? How else will anyone who doesn't know about Jesus distinguish the difference between Christians and non-Christians. In our society, the two groups look the same! Except for the small fact that Christians aren't supposed to do some "immoral" things and spend 2 hours Sunday morning in a building with a cross on it.

"Therefore the man who stands before God with his well-kept avoidance ethic and his protest that he did not spend too much time at the office but came home and watched TV with his family will probably not escape the indictment that he wasted his life. Jesus rebuked his disciples with words that easily apply to this man: Even sinners work hard, avoid gross sin, watch TV at night, and do fun stuff on the weekend. What more are you doing than the others? (Luke 6:32-34; Matthew 5:47)"

I’m starting to think Satan’s strategy here is not to frighten us with the supernatural, but to deaden us into complacency and distract us with entertainment. In medicine, the temptation is to seek a life of comfort, because you’re so wiped out from your training and tired of being overworked and underpaid. You watch all your other friends in their late twenties and early thirties make more than you and live normal lives. When you’re actually presented with a choice, you just want to find some cushy job. It’s a strange mixture of entitlement and necessity, to pay back massive loans.

But even now there’s that feeling of deadened routine and pointless leisure. This past week was really long, one of those weeks where you wait for each work day to be over, come home to go through the routine of chores, wind down doing something mindless before waking up to start it all over again.

I was reading through some of D’s old blog entries, which was sort of an inspiring thing to do. He wrote so honestly, with so much of the heart and substance that he still has, but I don’t always uncover in the daily grind. What he wrote above really resonated. I think we all want that: for our lives to be about a greater, truer purpose than ourselves; to be about more than entertainment, appearance, status, or superficial comfort.

Of course, it starts now. It doesn’t start when I’ve caught up on my sleep, or after the baby goes to bed, or when we finish residency and get to wherever we’re going. It starts with the moment I take to be with God, to reflect and listen and relate. The type of boldness and faith it takes to be living a life like that takes a foundation built upon all those moments. For some reason this can be really hard to do. But no one ever said it would be easy.