Dang, Volume 51: The Beginning of Spring

Bauer Timothy Jones was born at 8:29 a.m. on Wednesday, March 17, deepening the chaos of our already happily chaotic family. He weighed more than a pound less than Fox but took more quickly to latching and feeding. He cried less, and when he did cry he never reached the extreme pitch we still remember from those first fraught nights with Fox at home.

Bauer was born with dark hair and blue eyes. They seem to move with an external focus I don’t remember developing as quickly with Fox, although whether it’s new with our second child or simply a part of Fox’s early life I’ve forgotten is unclear to me.

Because of a high volume of new births at that time, the hospital placed us in a ward room with three other new sets of parents, each family group sequestered behind the sort of curtain with a mesh panel at the top that you only ever see in hospitals.

For two days we were surrounded by plastic and styrofoam. I slept with my legs under a sink and my feet poking out into the common area. We were discouraged from so much as stepping for a moment into the hallway outside the door, and never saw the faces of our many roommates as they rotated in and out over the course of our stay. We came to identify them by their shoes, visible below the curtain as they stepped by to use the shared bathroom.

We got to know them, though: their struggles with feeding, especially, and the new parents’ panic at unexpected behavior from their newborns. If your baby starts to gag on a bottle hours after entering the world, it’s not hard for your sleepless mind to short-circuit and shock itself with premonitions of choking and death.

Urgently summoned, the nurses offered their reassurances with a kind of heroic calm. Their casual attitude was the active ingredient that treated the panic at its root, the balm for which their words were merely the applicator. I have to think they could have said any combination of irrelevant things and their comportment could still have done its work.

And now here we are, a month and a day out and confident in muscle memory we’ve developed over multiple years. It enables us to change diapers as small as a dishrag, or manage the blackened curl that remains of an umbilical cord, or automatically stabilize the neck while lifting the baby away from where Fox may be about to fall.

Fox’s first meeting with the baby was difficult; it took him two weeks to start referring to the baby and even longer to do so by his name. We’re now at a point where he finds excuses to bring Bauer a soother in his bassinet. Sometimes he tries to stick it right into his mouth.

Fox’s lexicon continues to grow, not through the acquisition of individual words with individuated referents but through repetitions of phrases that feel good to him to say. He often performs actions to be thanked; when he is thanked he tells us we are welcome, we are welcome, we are welcome! He says but does not sing children’s songs. If we attempt to sing with him he clutches his ears and tells us “no want it.”

Bingley adapted to the new reality early on after being prepped by my wife’s parents, who plied him with Bauer’s swaddles so he could get the scent before joining us at home. He avoids the baby unless he is crying, in which case Bingley will whine and occasionally attempt to lick his head.

For our part, Mel and I feel like pilots strapped in to an experimental rocket. Millions of pounds-per-square-inch of power—genetics, animal instinct, family history, “to bake an apple pie, you must first create the universe”—now lift us somewhere we haven’t been before.

I find it tough, as I ought to have better anticipated. I no longer understand how parents of multiple children have careers. Even just finding time to read during the day is a challenge, to say nothing of more creative pursuits. Our comfortable rituals of domestic labor before Bauer arrived have changed to meet our new needs: mainly they have become unrelenting again.

It’s hard to see this scenario as being characteristic of a “season” of life when it feels so encompassing, but as has always been the case for me, mental health requires manually extending the point of the present towards possible futures. Simone Weil, my furtive reading earlier this morning, provided me with a concept I find useful towards this end: in an essay on “the right use of school studies,” she makes a case that rote intellectual exercises increase the power of attention, which can then be made available for prayer. Exercises that strain one’s capacity for sustained attention are intrinsically valuable even when the object of attention doesn’t have any intrinsic interest, is one of Weil’s upshots.

Our toddler’s flights of irrationality provide endless occasions for sounding out the desire beneath his inscrutable vocalizing. As with our maternity ward nurses, the significance is in his comportment rather than his words, but even the somatic meanings are ambiguous. As we learn better his body’s tells, we grow in our capacity for attention of other kinds. My hope is that we are developing a spiritual complement to the sustaining muscle memory that continues to carry us through this stage—strength by which we can pull our focus towards one another when it would careen away.

But for all that, there’s really no need for justifications beyond the life we are together cultivating. My wife and I spin and toil now, hard drives running with monitors unplugged, so that our children will grow up knowing the joy of being alive—or of being anything at all—in God’s enormous and unnecessary world. Seek first the kingdom, even if it means a few years of having your mind regularly bludgeoned with electronic renditions of “The Wheels on the Bus," and the rest will be given, all in good time.