Sweet Jack is 9 months old already, and I am 18 months older than I was the day I found out we were having a baby.
A friend (I forget which, now, and maybe more than one) told me that certain babies are meant to be, and they are conceived only in the perfect conditions to create them. Predetermined people, waiting to be made. The two perfectly halved ladders of genetic material divided, met, and multiplied to make him blond, and big, and early to teethe, late to crawl. In the winter of 2007-08 his twenty nine year old mother built him, while his thirty year old father hurriedly finished scholarly obligations that kept him from home. The economy contracted, politicians competed in primaries, cancerous cells multiplied in the body of his Great Grandmother. He was born in the spring when his parents were together again, and in this month of his birth fifty two U.S. soldiers died in Iraq. He is learning to eat foods of all kinds, and stand, and smile, as his canine companion begins to morph from wild puppy to more sedate adult. He will be one, or two, or three, or even four when his parents move him to a new home, where new work awaits. He will be two or three when his parents present to him a squalling, blotchy competitor. He will be ten in 2018, twenty in 2028, and fifty in 2058, when I will be eighty. Each year’s challenges will confront him at his different ages, and he will be the age he is because he was born in 2008, when he was meant to be born.
Neither earth shattering, nor particularly original, and yet as it happens to me I feel so wide awake, proud. My son will be thirty one day, my age now.
What shapes him more? The state of the world at large, or the fact that his Mama buries her face in his neck and breathes deep before he goes to bed? His developing neurons gobble up space with pathways, synapse and seratonin, electric current firing away and building a personality, a person. What is he becoming when we sway together in the dark?
We are imperfect, Patrick and I, and yet he is the perfect expression of us, two. There is nothing better at this moment in time than a baby boy sleeping in a blue batted crib and his mother and father, listening to his breath in the dark.