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recent posts
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Breastfeeding Benefit Debunked, Still Praised
How Wrong is it Not to Care?
Why Buy It?
Towers to the Sky
My Baby My Billboard
Books & Boys
Not a Cartoon
Go Ahead, Cry!
Flanagan Rant-again
PSA
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You've got questions, she's got answers. Be among the first to read Elise Mac Adam's new etiquette guide.
Pre-order from:
- Simon & Schuster
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Cheers!
I'm vicariously observing a red-letter week. Babies are arriving and thrilling their parents in ways that fourteen months ago I really could not have imagined. Fourteen months ago I was too caught up in a singularly persistent discomfort that had not let me sleep for many weeks to really get excited properly, and I think that not knowing what having a child would be like left me at a disadvantage. I know better now.
(And no, I am certainly not writing this with the smug and much hated "you can't understand anything until you've had a child" attitude. It is one thing to be condescending, another entirely to be blindsided by nostalgia, as I have been.)
These children have arrived in conventional and unconventional ways. Some are first children, others already have at least one sibling; another is being adopted. And is it all amazing. Astonishing.
And until Felix was born, while I could absolutely share in the pleasure that friends and family took in their new children and new lives- and these are children I know and love- I understand much better right now what my little cluster of people is experiencing. And I am nostalgic. In some way I am maybe a bit jealous of the swamp of pleasure and thrills, and fear that they are wading in- the sense of having your identity temporarily cut loose while you get to engage with the new creature that is altering everything. It is a new world for these families. All day, I yearned for Felix, even though he was trotting around me. I kept finding opportunities to catch and squeeze him (he doesn't mind really, as long as you say "I'm going to get you" first.)
So this is really just to say that I understand now, and in this week of a little population pop where I am reading breathless emails of play-by-play adoption news while sitting by the phone hoping to get word from an uptown hospital, I am very happy that I really can comprehend. It means so much to me to have been included in all of these lives and I think Felix has helped make me a better participant.
posted by Elise at 4:56 AM
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