Baby Blues and that Tyrant, Time

Before our baby was born, Josh and I visited his family in MI and descended to the basement that had functioned as his final bedroom in his parents' house. There was stored the last of his boyhood "stuff". We packed it up and took it home to WI.

After the trip a huge box and a couple of bags of Joshly treasures sat in the middle of the living room floor waiting for me to find a place for them. These treasures took the form of boyish treatises on history, written on notepaper; awards and trophies for scripture memorization; treasured Transformers toys from the 80's; a mechanical science project; and other objects which in themselves could hardly take their place in our home decor but whose emotional meaning could not be disaccounted either. Over a number of days I worked through the stuff, categorizing, organizing in space-saving piles, and finally finding storage crannies for almost all of it.

This process was probably more important to me than to Josh.

I met my husband in a college classroom. We were both skinny ex-homeschooled freshmen. I sat upright in my desk clasping my Old Testament Survey notebook in readiness, while Josh's enormous eyes moved rapidly around the room as if activity were the only defense against unintended self-revelation. All around us, Christian School graduates reposed in their chairs, projecting acceptable, if clichaic, personae with practised composure.

Even though I went to another school the following semester (I was to return two years later) the memory of our brief introduction remained with both of us. Neither of us had "impressed" the other even slightly; we were incapable of "impressing" anyone. I think what remained is the feeling of having locked eyes for a moment with the only other real person in the room.

When we met again a few years later we were more than ready to marry and our courtship was swift.

In encounters with other men I had first had my heart broken in traditional girlhood fashion, then been blindsided by an unexpected and to this day unexplained humiliation. By 2002 I was swirling helplessly in a maelstrom of depression so severe that I became aware of the willpower expended in every step my feet took down the sidewalk.

Meanwhile Josh had just ended a long relationship with a pretty, popular girl who had defied her strict fundamentalist family to the extent of engaging in a relationship at all but had dangled Josh's hopes in ongoing indecision over completing that defiance.

Afterwards Josh rose up in the determination to select the most serious girl in the college, irrespective of status or good looks, and marry her. He settled on the gray ghost of humanity that was me. (As you can see from the pictures of our pre-wedding feast in the sidebar, I bloomed rather quickly in subsequent days.)

Meanwhile, I was disgusted with the passive approach to romance that most of the young men around me took. My criteria for a good husband had narrowed down, representatively, to a guy's willingness to take the risks of pursuit upon himself rather than maneuvering the girl into doing so.

One night at school Josh approached me and started talking. My first response was polite but listless. Josh ignored this fact and kept talking. My soul leapt to life at his revelation that he was a homeschooler. Looking into his eyes I could see he wasn't being condescending but was actually interested in talking to me. We sat down and continued the conversation for four hours.

"I'm not someone a lot of people like." I hinted around 9 pm, providing the only opening I was going to give him.

"I like you." He responded promptly.

I didn't find the wherewithal to answer.

"I like you, Alana" he said again. "Will you have breakfast with me tomorrow?"

Three months later we were officially engaged, (although true to the code I had been brought up with it was only a month after that conversation that I knew I was going to marry him because I had allowed him to hold my hand.)

And just a year and one month after that first conversation we were married. In that intervening time each of us came to thoroughly know and appreciate the others' present self. But due to our short courtship, what was largely missing was an understanding of our former progress of being.

So looking through Josh's boyhood treasures spread out on the living room floor was almost like having that first conversation over again.

As a pre-maturely mature firstborn I had been lonely at 13, at 16, at 18 and at 20. But now I became aquainted with the Josh who at 18 had his graduation protrait taken with a Bible in one hand and a world globe in the other, and I felt some of those lonely, ossified cells of my heart filling in with comfort. The Josh of 15 had transformed a school assignment into a fascinating essay on why the French left Mexico so hurriedly in 1865. I smiled and remembered the poetry assignments in my high school literature book, over which I had labored into the night while my siblings played outdoors and my mother indulgently ignored the science and math I wasn't doing that day. (See Poem III, below.) Josh at 13 jealously herded up what was left of his Transformers, protecting them from the careless rampages of his younger brothers, and preserved them forever in the form I found them. I, meanwhile, had filled boxes and journals with keepsakes and memories, terrified of losing to that tyrant, Time, what awakened such violence of affections in my present.

My first journal entry:

"September 8 1990

Today Maggie and I had a great idea. Maggie started it. We worked on it almost all day long. Later we went to the M---'s. We even worked on it there!"

My eight-year old self failed to record what the "great idea" was, apparently preferring to talk about the joyous stretching experience of having the idea, and working on it in common with sympathetic others.

As I thought about the process of being that was me, of which only the present stage was being experienced by myself; and as I compared to that the process of being that was my husband, more of which I was now becoming aware, I began to wonder what our offspring would be like.

Terrified of parenthood, this was an indulgence I did not often allow my curiousity. I ignored the fact that I was having a baby for most of my pregnancy. But in the silent sunny living room that day I gazed at my husband's kindergarten picture - those enormous blue eyes, that mischevious smile - and wondered.

And then I read his baby book. His mom had sent it home with us among his ice skates and grade school records. I marked, with that long-ago mother's hand, his first laugh, word, song, and when he ate what. My Josh had been a precocious child, had done everything early. A true firstborn, as was I. What, I wondered, could we expecct from the firstborn of two firstborns?

And what a Daddy's boy. In the book his mother commented almost unnecessarily on Josh's preference for his dad and I wondered whether she were hurt by it or whether she thought it was cute. Later it became clear that she found Josh an unaffectionate child, which astounded me because I know of no one more so.

I resolved ahead of time (a thing I rarely do) that I would never demand love from my child, never prod him to develop more quickly than others. I would give only; I would expect only that which would make him good, not impressive. Better that he be real, that he love freely and develop according to what good was given him. I put Josh's school pictures in the desk drawer and packed the rest of his stuff away in a closet, feeling that I had met someone very important.

Ian was a year old a week ago. As I prepared for his party I mentally relived startling moments from that awful night a year ago. Lying down for sleep, two weeks late and wondering when it would ever end; jumping up in the sudden knowledge that it was about to; the midnight rush to the hospital that was a half hour away; the pain, pain, pain, in the bath and out of the bath, and finally surrendering to a strong pain-killer; almost sleeping; the pain coming back and the nurses calling the doctor; me getting out of bed and pacing; the doctor coming in and telling me it was time to push; the desperate necessity that made me expel this now-foreign yet never strange being from my body; tearing my body open and spilling my blood in a shallow spreading lake all over a steel table; and not caring what happened to me for hours afterward as I was sewn, drained, pumped, cleaned...and then Ian, lying in my arms and my sudden surprise: "Josh, he's beautiful!" and Josh laughing at me: "Of course he is."

Then I said hello to my son. And he looked at me. Quizzically. Pure, scientific interest, a question in his eerily-mature, intelligent, enormous blue eyes. I murmurred to him, called him "Kid." His eyes narrowed for a moment; then he closed them and slept.

Why am I re-living this now? The shock was too much a year ago. I didn't want to think about it, I just wanted to make sure I didn't have to do it again any time soon.

But even in the desperate, sleepless months that followed, when fear for my mind and anxiousness for my body overtook me, I was afraid most of all of my old enemy, that tyrant Time. Since the very beginning I have obsessively taken photographs: Ian's defiances and laughs and that old quizzical look that appears on his face every day as he plays with my cell phone or looks at the sky, chases a ball down the parking-lot incline, or decides whether he's going to eat a new food. Or that wide-mouthed breathy intake of Joy when he sees his Daddy sleeping. He's such a Daddy's boy.

When he wakes up in the morning the first thing Ian wants is to see his Sleeping Daddy. He literally leaps from my arms into the curled-up crook of Josh's sleeping body and hugs his Daddy awake to recieve his smiles and a fatherly kiss. When Josh is home Ian never wants to be out of his arms.

Am I jealous?

I'm terribly, terribly in love. My two boys look at me with identical enormous blue eyes and out of those identical eyes shines an identical love and excitement: for me and for the whole world. They are my healing. I didn't expect either of them but they came to me and in them came the love of God to me. I never have to ask. In fact, I find it better policy not to ask. I've kept my resolution and never demanded love from either of them, desperately as I might need it. And it's due, not to my wisdom, but to the spirit that is in them, that the more I don't ask the more they give. When I hold my boys to my heart and close my eyes I sense our souls merging into one another and that is when Time dies for a moment and I am truly happy.

My salvation will be much more, I know, but I have a standard - it cannot be less than this.