A Kind Thing Feeds On Your Heart

Notes on having a 1 year old child

The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new.
~Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh 

• Love is the answer, before you even know what the question is.

• Teaching a child doesn’t mean telling a child what to do or disciplining them. It means becoming the person that your child is supposed to emulate, and living that everyday. It isn’t enough to speak about what has to be done. A path forward must be forged.

• The name Samantha means “God has heard.” I didn't know what the name meant when we decided to name her, but I think of it often now. If I could have designed the perfect baby, I don't think she could have been more perfect. Nature rises up to fulfill us in ways we can't understand, because we too, are nature, and the most ancient part of us still speaks the proto-language of all creation.

• Samantha started walking a day after her first birthday. I used to be unable to understand why parents got so excited about their kids' milestones. After all, every kid experienced it. So who cares? But watching my daughter learn to walk is like executing a program and watching it run. It's like seeing the patterns of life that God traced a million years ago. It's understanding that life begets life, and that even the smallest mundanity is a disguised miracle.

• I told myself I wouldn't be one of those people who had a bunch of toys that their baby never played with. I am one of those people. The toys are just as much for me as they are for her, and it's difficult to resist the impulse to give us everything if it even has the slightest chance of sparking joy.

• Every day the darkness becomes more unappealing. Once you see that the glittering void offers you nothing but death and pain with no reward, you can't unsee it. I am not the child anymore in a dark hoodie and dirty Converse with Jean Paul Sartre's "Nausea" tucked underneath my arm. To flirt with misery doesn't feel bold and exciting anymore. It's a courtship with the ravenous nothingness that wants to feed on you, and won't be satisfied until you're dead.

• So much of modern parenting is designed around what's convenient for the parent, not what's beneficial to the child. Children are supposed to be annoying and intrusive and loud. They're supposed to take up a lot of your time. They are not supposed to fit neatly into your life in their appropriate time slots. You are raising a human being who will go on to have their own life. You should treat your child like a human being, not a machine that needs to be programmed.

• Having a child doesn’t make you a better person, but it does force you to confront the flaws about yourself that before you were able to avoid. There isn’t the time or the space to become comfortably numb. There isn't anyone you can pass off the responsibility of things you've found difficult in the past. But this is a crucible. Some people get through it stronger. Others just double down on their worst traits.

• I'd say it probably took me about a year to get used to being a mother, and since Samantha is constantly changing I continue having to adjust, to make refinements and tweaks to my routines and behavior. It's like a second adolescence for women, a time when you're stretched between who you used to be and who you're becoming. All transformations are painful to some degree. But now that I'm on the other side, I couldn't imagine wanting to go back to who I used to be.

• Having a child means looking up at the moon and wanting to take her up there so she can see the magnificence of the Earth as it floats suspended in velvet space. It strips away the ugliness you’re so used to seeing because you want to show her that our eyes can become attuned to beauty.

• I didn't have postpartum depression. I had postpartum euphoria. I'd wanted a child for so long, and she had finally arrived, and I was happier than I thought was even possible. It allowed me to push through the exhaustion and the huge lifestyle change.

• Once I fully embraced that I'd never get to have those huge swathes of time that I used to, writing actually became more fun. It became a challenge to find pockets of time to write, and when I did get the chance, I couldn't afford to procrastinate. It reminded me of being a kid again and squeezing in time to write between classes and chores. It was a private game to see how much I could write. There's more excitement and reward involved because it becomes more of an effort.

• Being a mother is obviously a job, but it's a strange one, with long periods of nothing to do but rock a sleepy child, or play with toy trains. It's often slow paced, but you also never get to clock out. Sometimes you'll have a good night's sleep, and sometimes you'll be up at 4 in the morning because your baby had a nightmare. There's nobody watching over your shoulder to make sure you're performing efficiently. All of the responsibility of parenthood rests upon you. It makes sense why people would struggle with the idea of it being a real job after a lifetime of being graded, recorded, and analyzed.

• The mysterious process of bearing and raising a child does not come with an easy set of facts to digest. There is still so much science can't explain about the process. There is no prerecorded "right" way to raise a child, so we must rely on our intuitions, like mystics and sages. This is why women are often not considered "rational." Rationality requires a kind of order and a system. We have to live in a place that exists beyond rationality.

• One of the best things in this life is to go to a place that you thought was forbidden to you and realize that you belonged this entire time. The life on the other side was just waiting patiently for you to cross the threshold and enter.

• A new softness has entered me. There is a thin membrane between my feelings, and the part of me that can withstand tenderness is weak and underdeveloped. People never tell you how much love and kindness can hurt. It can be treated by the body like a kind of hostile foreign invader.

• Maybe the heart isn't something that needs to be protected. Maybe it's something to be given up, placed on an altar of loam in a dusk-lit woods, to be eaten by the kind animals that have crept out of the dark to find nourishment.

• It's impossible to understand the scope of how much a child will impact your life. It's a relationship that you'll probably have for the rest of your life. Samantha will be a dependent for longer than I've been an adult. I'm excited for each year to bring new challenges and new adventures as we grow together.

• If you ever read this Samantha, I want you to know that you were always loved and wanted. And if we raise you well, you'll never have to question the fact.

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