We have been taken aback by how quickly the first few weeks with Ellie have flown by. And just in three short weeks, Ellie is changing before our eyes. The newborn size diapers are growing snug and her chins and dimples are multiplying. Her eyes, which wandered (sometimes in different directions) in her first few days, now move in coordination with each other and often fix themselves on us. She still seems most relaxed sleeping on top of our chests. Her stretches of sleep have grown slightly longer and having received approval to let her sleep longer than three hours at a time at her two week appointment (because she had rebounded back to her birth weight), our stretches of sleep have somewhat increased as well.
It is also remarkable how much longer it takes to tick any particular item off of our list of tasks. We stay in bed until late morning in an effort to reclaim some of the sleep lost during the night. We carefully coordinate our moves from one room of the house to another, planning the items that need to travel with us and the order in which they should be transported. When one of us showers or prepares a meal, the other is with Ellie. Every two to three hours, a new cycle of feeding Ellie, changing her diaper, and pumping breast milk begins. I wonder if the care of baby Ellie seems somewhat manageable only because both of her parents are currently working full time on meeting her needs!
We are avid, if sleep-deprived, students of hers. Because her ravenous appetite can appear moments after she rouses from a deep sleep, we have dubbed her the baby dinosaur. And because still, at three weeks, she spends most of her time in that deep sleep, I also call her snoozy. Sometimes, in the midst of frustration, she pushes her lower lip way out, the way I used to do as a child. And often she furrows her brow -- there are already tiny creases! -- the way that Nitin still does now. She already uses her hands quite intentionally -- she holds the top of her bottle while she sucks, she has terrific aim for grabbing my sore nipples, and when I hold my finger near her fist, she uncurls her fingers and wraps them around mine.
When I inhale her sweet scent, nose pressed to the downy peach of her head, I think of all the ages that she will be, God willing. The prospects of pushing her swing and teaching her to ride a bike delight me and naturally, the likelihood that in the midst of her great adventures, she will bump her head and scrape her knees and have her feelings hurt makes me want to hold on forever. And before any of that happens, the plan is for me to return to my work outside the home, and leave her in the care of someone who is not me or her father. Parenthood provides many acute reminders that life must be lived one day, or even one hour or moment, at a time. Careful planning remains indispensable, but the task of worrying about your beloved child's entire life in one sitting is daunting.
At this moment, Ellie rocks next to me in her rock 'n play -- a cradle that plugs into the wall and sways for hours on end, inspiring the envy of grown ups who wish the contraption came in adult sizes. She is sated by four ounces of milk consumed an hour ago and she coos while drifting in and out of sleep, lifting one arm above her head and holding one fist near her face, as she has done since before her birth. She is warm but not hot, shaded from the sun, cozy in a footed sleeper with tiny owls printed on it.
The journalist Hodding Carter noted in his 1953 book, "Where Main Street Meets the River," that a wise woman had told him that parents may make two lasting bequests to their children -- roots and wings. Providing roots requires thoughtfulness and consistency; roots are instilled through the dailiness of parenting. And roots may also require self control -- a well-rooted child belongs to a family in which bonds are strongly maintained, which may require forgoing shouting matches or snide comments.
And providing wings to one's child...requires so much courage. I remember the tears my mother and I shed before I boarded a plane to Spain for a month in the summer after my junior year of high school. I remember new tears when I left for college in Washington, D.C., a year later. We cried because of that powerful constellation of roots, tying us to each other and reminding me of who I was no matter where I traveled. And I traveled because, out of that deep well of love, she gave me wings.
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