Newborn Daze
New baby alert at the Emergency Contacts HQ
Not advice, just an observation: The newly born are closer to the “other place” than they are to our world. You will see it when you look into their eyes. They are feral, animalistic succubi, with vast and unknowable black pupils that fill their entire eye sockets. They don’t know you, or love you, they simply have a fervor to survive by any means offered.
Wherever it is they came from – I do not venture any particular theological framework towards that. But I can confidently say they are more of that place than they are of this one.
In the pause that followed, my friends stared at me in horror. Oops.
I don’t mean that in a bad way – I backpedaled – it’s not like they’re scary! Ha ha ha ha ha. At the time, my friends JR and Christian were expecting their first baby in a few weeks. [She’s now a gorgeous one-year-old, and I hope my ill-timed observations were quickly forgotten.]
You can learn more about JR’s pathway to parenting, gay fatherhood, the Men Having Babies Conference, and queer legacies in this podcast episode from early in their journey:
I meant it reassuringly. Don’t worry if your emotions towards this thing are primeval, and not yet recognizable as “love” at the beginning. We respect and fear the awesome alien creature; we are curious. We are compelled to keep it alive by a force beyond our understanding, even when the reasonable response to its relentless annoyances would be to punt it into the sun.
By my calculus, there is a point at which you can see the soul enter an infant’s body, and it definitely isn’t within the first couple months of life. My friend Janet maintains that this ensoulment happens as late as nine months old. I think it’s closer to the first time they smile at you, on purpose. Oh, hello, human.
We have a new pre-soul person in the house again. Baby # 2 is here. Your faithful post-nuclear co-parents are now parents of two.
backstory:
Baby # 2: Electric Boogaloo
There was something intimately hilarious about the “DIY” nature of how the pregnancy began a few years ago. The wordless handoff of a cup at the juncture of our doorways each month; the ironic eyebrow quirk we would exchange as if to silently say, “cheers; here goes nothing!”; the fact that through cosmic (follicular) coincidence, our son was conceived …
Now that Andrew and I are experiencing our second trip to Newbornland, there is one point I would retract. Newborns are, in fact, scary! How else would you describe the sensation, in the dark of night, of a creature with the splotchy skin and splayed limbs of a spatchcocked chicken, scrabbling up your chest to feed from your body with milky sightless eyes and paperthin, razor-sharp claws? That’s the experience of the very first night with a newborn — only minutes or hours from them being cut off from their previous foodsource: your bloodstream.
Jump scares aside, we’re pleased with New Baby. Meena didn’t keep us at the hospital too long in getting here. She is wee and snoozy. I perceived ourselves as relaxed with our parenting last time, but our levels of Unbothered are now off the charts. There’s a different ease of navigating the wilds of Newbornland, having walked the trails before.
Everything is easier and less overwrought the second time, from the birth itself to the recovery, to the foggy navigation of these early days. I remember with astonishment the alarms I set to make sure we were feeding Aadi every three hours when he was brand new. Timetables be damned! We now do what we want, when we want. We submit to the process of circadian chaos; we do not impose controls on the otherworld creature’s adjustment to day, night, gravity, or a functioning gastrointestinal system. Let us recall that newborns don’t even know how to reliably fart until an astonishing three-to-four months of life. How are we gonna have the hubris to ask them to adhere to a timetable?!
We are less concerned with strict measures of parenting equality, too. I can recall the Naval precision with which we observed the changing of the guard on overnight shifts with newborn Aadi, part of our system to navigate platonic co-parenting fairly. Now it’s a bit more holistic. You do this unpleasant toddler thing, and I’ll do this unpleasant newborn thing, and let’s share in the pleasant parts together when we can. We know we can push and pull to find that egalitarian middle ground, which we sketched out much more deliberately with our first child. We’ve laid the foundations. The rest will come out in the wash.
We laugh more, too. The many absurdities and indignities are funnier when you can rest easy about your ability to keep the creature alive, having done it once before. Andrew recently became morbidly obsessed with the promotional rollout of a new single from Clay Aiken, and has been watching clips from instagram which feature a loud button-down shirt, and a triple-filtered, uncanny-valley face to match the overprocessed vocal production. I sit there, trying to nurse the baby, and wonder whether my earliest core memories of our new daughter will be mentally soundtracked to Clay Aiken brandishing a boombox on Reels. [Twist: is the song actually great, though?]
Last time, we repeated the parenting truism “this too shall pass” as a source of endurance and comfort when things got hairy. This time, it is more of a warning bell. This too shall pass — cuddle that alien succubus a little closer.
I adore hearing it like it is! One time, I stumbled upon my mom’s diary of the first months after I was born and it was clear to me that my first smile couldn’t have come one day later! One day she was like: idk, should I get the hell away from this succubus?, and the next, like: Lola smiled!
Also, there are some perfect sentences in here, case in point: “How else would you describe the sensation, in the dark of night, of a creature with the splotchy skin and splayed limbs of a spatchcocked chicken, scrabbling up your chest to feed from your body with milky sightless eyes and paperthin, razor-sharp claws?”
Aguri! 🌟 Meena is such a sweet name. 💗