Right Here, Right Now

Once in a while, it hits me anew that I’m a parent, and I’m not sure how to explain it any better than, well, that’s what it is. I wake up every day and do this, of course, but sometimes I’ll look at Sam — this tiny, relatively new face who is now as recognizable as my own reflection — and think, holy cow, I’m this kid’s mother. Whoa.

It happens in small increments, I think, this whole parenthood thing. You get a baby who is a completely unfamiliar person, and though you love them to a terrifying degree for some totally inexplicable reason (because, after all, they are a stranger), it’s more like taking care of an extremely demanding and annoying pet for a (long) while there. A newborn is kind of the way I would envision a life-size amoeba to be — all formless and tender-skinned, squashy, blob-like and too easily broken. It seems ridiculous to me, on an evolutionary level, that most animals give birth to creatures who are capable of moving independently, whereas we basically give birth to a fetus. A needy, frustrating, somewhat joyless fetus.

I mean, I was joyful and thrilled, of course (that is when I wasn’t contemplating how I could check myself into an institution because of The Screaming), but it’s nothing compared to the person I live with now, and I think that, above all, is what might make any subsequent children more frustrating. I know how good it can get, and I know there’s a person inside of those tiny things waiting to blossom, but in the meantime, I’ll be stuck with something more appropriate for tucking away in my pouch, if only I were a damn marsupial.

I’m not sure one gets many opportunities to wish they were a kangaroo, but believe me, dealing with a newborn is one of those times.

But now! Ho! Man, life is on one of those sweet streaks, where even the worst days aren’t that bad, and not even the return of eastern standard time (WHY WHY WHY) can dampen the unflagging joy that flies through the house on a daily basis. There are kisses (“Mmmmmwah!”) and hugs and leading me around the house by the hand. We color, we write in notebooks, she sits and reads her books to herself for long periods of time, she washes her hands in her play kitchen and proudly announces, “CLEAN!” while waving her sticky hands in the air. The dog is god, second only to DJ Lance, and a bad mood can be lifted by reminding Sam that doggy is over there, and wouldn’t doggy like to be petted? As she snuggles with Sunny, she laughs that desperate, near-tears laugh of someone who thought the world was ending, but realized they’d been given a reprieve, maybe by a last-minute astroid destruction manned by Bruce Willis.

And the evenings, oh, the evenings. She comes alive in the evenings, once the witching hour has passed, and her world lights up in technicolor when Daddy walks through the door. She runs through the house screaming at the top of her lungs, “DADDY! DADDY! DADDY!” and leaps on top of him, hugging him so tightly that it’s as if she thought he’d left that morning, never to return. She often gives him the same treatment after he exits the shower in the morning, although she’d seen him not ten minutes prior. And then, for a glorious hour before she heads to bed, they play. He tickles, she laughs. They catch up on their days, and his responses to her gibberish make me wish their conversations were real and that she understood what he was saying, because man, I married a funny dude. They dance — or rather, sometimes we all dance, throwing any concerns of our own self-consciousness to the wind as we rock out, for the millionth time, to “Loco Legs,” as sung by the interminably cheerful Fresh Beat Band. This family’s got loco legs, let me tell you.

I know we lived without her. I know we had more than a decade together, including five or six wonderful years of marriage — years of building a solid foundation that made this life, this incredibly sweet, sweet life, exactly what it is today. I know that I wouldn’t change a second of our lives together to this point, and that it was worth it, it was all so worth it, but hell if I can remember it with any detail, because this; this is precisely where we are, and it is exactly where we should be.

*Jesus Jones OR Fatboy Slim

40 comments November 8th, 2010