On Meeting My Two Month Old Infant
A person should never have to try to remember when they were introduced to their baby. Should never have to meet their newborn only to find the baby is no longer a newborn, but is now a two month old tiny person. Of course, one should never have to sleep for 47 days either.
"There's still so much I'm unclear about even now, years later, so much I'll never know, like layers and layers of baby Swiss cheese, holes lapping over substance, but when peeled apart, you still find holes. I keep doing what any good reporter trying to keep at a story does--as new questions in an old story surface, go back to your primary source. So much later I do.
"Tim, remember the day you first brought Caroline to me after I woke up?" I've called him at work because I'm trying to remember this and I'm unclear when exactly it happened. It's a memory floating, without context, and I need him to ground it for me. "She was wearing a red outfit. Sharon handed her to me. What day was that? Was it October 15th?"
"Well, there were two days. Which one do you mean?"
"Two days?"
"Can we talk about this tonight?"
"Sure, but you remember?"
"Yeah, but I don' have time right now to explain it."
I hang up feeling a little like when you get to the end of a chapter in the book you're reading and you get one question answered only to have another question raised, so you turn one more page because you really want to know what happens, except you have to stop reading now because it's time to fix dinner or the house is on fire or something and you're a little irritated because this unanswered question's still hanging out there and you want to read a little longer but you can't. I have a single memory of waking from unconsciousness and being presented with my baby. And now there are two days, another page to turn, another layer of Swiss to peel back.
-Excerpted from my memoir The Long Awakening.
