ahead of our time

they other day i came across a wrinkled article i cleverly stole from a magazine at a doctor's office once (have you ever done that? it's quite a rush!)--i couldn't not keep it. it was beautiful. and i couldn't decide this morning if i wanted to write about this or about beauty, because the rain was pouring on the green green world and it was so magical...but then maybe beauty is just a part of everything, so if i write about this i will be writing about beauty anyways?

in any case, here's the article:

Becoming a father
by Jay Teitel

Sarah Jennifer Teitel was born at 4:45 on a winter afternoon in 1979, in a room full of light. The sun was setting in the dead centre of a delivery-room picture window as she was born, giving the space the feel of an aquarium at dawn. The presiding obstetrician, a bit of a joker, paused when the baby was out only to its waist, like a kayaker. "Last bets on the sex," he said. Then he pulled the little slick body all the way clear, and it was a girl. I was in love.
And nothing had changed.
The details first: the delivery room was as crowded as a bus station, and in the welter of interns and residents my wife had actually momentarily shifted her hostility from me to the standup comic of an obstetrician, who at one point announced that since nothing much was happening, he was just going to step outside "for a sec."
"No, you're not," said my wife. A moment later the head crowned, white and vegetal, and then our daughter was out, her fists raised like a prizefighter's and her mouth as wide open as Lucy getting ready to yell "Blockhead!" at Charlie Brown. The umbilical cord was cut, the baby was carried like a brisket to a little stainless steel counter, weighed, suctioned, injected, swathed in a blanket, and brought to me. Her weight in my arms was half cloth, a narrow living wire inside flannel.
And I knew, even before my wife said, "Let me see," that I was feeling something irreversible. I was more than infatuated, more than doomed. I was involved in a process that made every other process that had gone before it not so much laughable as immaterial. I was a total goner.
And nothing had changed.
Here's why. Change usually involves a noticeable component, something detectable, added or subtracted. But when my daughter was born that afternoon, although something had definitely happened, nothing had changed. The second she was there, it was as though she'd always been there. It was as though I'd been asleep for 30 years and had woken up behind a stranger's eyes, except that this lovesick stranger was no stranger at all.
"Everything old is new again," the line goes in the song describing garden-variety love. "Everything new is old again" better describes seeing your child born. Men are all idiots, and here's one more thing we don't know until it's too late. We all have a doppelganger floating in the ether over our heads, identical to us in every respect except for being tweaked with a love so unconditional it turns every other love into a contract full of loopholes.
Mothers may create children. But children build fathers, from pieces the find in space.




i know none of us has kids yet (unless jamison's got a lovechild stowed away somewhere?), but that's just the perfectly most interesting time in life. because, while we can analyze ourselves and figure out how our fathers and mothers have (and haven't) made us who we are, we are also leaving behind our adolescent selves and becoming men and women who might almost be fathers and mothers of new souls.

my dear friend vange came to visit me the other weekend, and we went shopping for baby clothes. (she was going to a baby shower.) there's something about that kind of activity that stirrs up strange things in a person. it's such foreign territory, but at the same time somehow deeply familiar.

does talking about this stuff freak you guys out? or does it make you excited? or apprehensive? i was watching Fight Club the other night and noting the discussion about being "a thirty year old boy," and looking through an old journal yesterday and laughing over a "brief essay on the male condition" that i wrote to entertain jen. so i was just curious to hear you guys' perspectives on the whole "becoming a father" phenomenon...what kind of men you figure you are and will be...what terrifies you...what excites you...what you hope and imagine...anything you want to say, no limits or required topics.

as "the resident girl," i guess i could share my perspective (and i probably should lest i get in trouble for not?). hmm. on "becoming a mother." let me see. actually, vange and i talked about this too (which is really funny to us because we are not really girly-girls who do that, but we indulge secretly with each other from time to time.) mostly, the both of us are just really excited to be absolutely mischievous...the kind of moms who encourage adventure and disaster and who track mud through the house because really, what's a home without a story written all over it...the kind who discourage mowing the lawn because that would ruin the enchanted "landscaping"...who know the importance of cookies and cartoons...the kind whose husbands roll their eyes (in a bad way)(that we will inevitably charm away) and marvel at how they had no idea what they were getting themselves into...the kind who trade in our 5-day-in-a-row hoodies for dresses and sparkly things and act like prissy princesses when the occasion really doesn't call for it (should we have daughters, they will need to learn what being a woman is really all about, right? sparkly stuff and acting classy!) ...i guess i would just be excited to cause havoc. to make everything seem like it had a "to be continued..." dangling curiously off of it. i would hope that my children love stories and secrets and believe in magic and play outside and make up terribly unfunny jokes and find their way past what everyone else tells them about God to discover a frighteningly exciting understanding of who he is and what their lives are for... i don't think any of it freaks me out. i figure most people are just terrified of "the teen years," but i'm a certified specialist in the psychological development of people from the ages of 0-25 so i'm good to go. mahah. but honestly, there is just so much potential in every person...how fun i think it must be to watch it happen from the very first heartbeat.....(yeah, that's right suckers--us girls get to know our children before you even get to see 'em! what do you think of that!)