Today you awoke to the best day. A day of excitement and anticipation. A day of dreams about to enfold. A day when your dreams emerge in technicolor, when hopes become sight.
Life will never be the same again … each of you will never be the same again.
It is the juxtaposition of the first day of your parenting adventure and the last day of just you two.
How much is to come into your lives, along with that little bundle.
That miracle of the first cry, the magnetic force that just will not allow you to divert your look into those inky eyes in which you see something you have never seen before, and yet something you have always known in your being.
The fear that you will break that fragile body and yet terror at how their cries rip at something within you that you had never before known exists.
The fear … it does not ever end and yet … the joys are eternal as well.
The aches … over and over they will rise and yet … the warmth of loving another is the essence of true comfort.
The cries … from hunger, from pain, from rejection, from anger, from something you have said or done … are nothing compared to inhaling their unique scent that is utopia itself (and never fades).
The growth … always up and away … it is excitement and dread for parents, their growth moves them on in life, and away from you … and yet, when they return (from a night’s sleep, from a first day of kindergarten, from an overnight, from university, from … their life) and share their life with you, your cup will overflow.
Today you will feel feelings and think thoughts you never knew to exist before. You will know wonder as if for the first time. You will feel so much smaller and it leaves you feeling more real than you thought possible. You will feel your heart enlarge til it might burst. There is an authenticity, a realness of life as if the air itself enters and exits your lungs from a deeper deep.
Your senses are all more heightened and you use them all spontaneously, innately, as if fulfilling natural instincts that have lain dormant since your own birth. Your ears will both delight and desire to cure the reason for the cries. You eyes will behold their eyes as if drunk on their very gaze. You lips will seek to kiss their skin, claiming it as your own. You lungs drinking in their very scent. You will be smitten with all of it, all of them.
Today you will feel a sense of purpose that you cannot achieve from any other earthly pursuit … as though it is, in fact, other-worldly.
It’s a good day, a laborious day.
I am not yet born; provide me
Louis MacNeice
With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
in the back of my mind to guide me.
itsawonderfilledlife 