A Moment

I was all set to write something inspired by an Oscar Wilde quote I stumbled on earlier today, but I think I'll save it for tomorrow. I just went over to the Pack-and-Play to check on Annika, who's been asleep for a couple of hours--which is great, considering before that she wasn't asleep for what seemed like three weeks but was actually since about 2. She is on her back, arms and legs splayed, head tilted slightly to one side, her tiny mouth, so much like Lily's, curled in a hint of a smile. Maybe she is thinking: I'm going to wake up in five minutes just to keep her on her toes. Probably not, though. I seem to be lucky with my children in the sleep department. Once they're asleep, they tend to stay asleep. I'm the one who doesn't sleep over here.

But I digress. So I was standing leaning over the Pack-and-Play which, for those of you who don't know is a sort of portable crib. Annika has been sleeping in this, set up in the dining room, because we have not been able to renovate our apartment, as per our original plan, and she doesn't have a room of her own; there is no room anywhere else for the crib. So at night, when I sit at my desk, she is six, seven feet away from me; when I stop typing, I can hear her breathe.

There is no cliche more prevalent among parents than "Time flies." If I had a dime for every time somebody has told me this in the context of parenthood, well, let's just say we'd have a bedroom for Annika already. And in some ways it's totally untrue. As someone who struggles with the mundane aspects of caring for an infant--the bouncing, changing, feeding, cooing, carrying, bouncing again ad infinitum--sometimes time seems stretched to its maximum capacity. This evening, for example, when an exhausted Lily was having a tantrum while Annika was screaming in her swingy seat and I was trying to get a bottle together, the two minutes it took me to do so seemed like all of 2007.

But earlier in the evening, as Lily sat on my lap as we read together, or tried to, as Annika kept wailing wherever we put her, Lily sighed, patted me on the back, and said while shaking her head, "Sometimes having a baby is just dreadful." Suddenly the last 4 years seemed to have passed in an instant. How can I have a child old enough to commiserate with me, old enough to use the word "dreadful?"

And now Annika. An hour ago or so I sat in the reclining chair and reclined it all the way back. I haven't done this in a while and then, right then, remembered August, when I spent every evening just like that: elevating my feet and trying not to think about how uncomfortable I was, imagining Annika, this theoretical child. It's like this: however you get your child, and it happens in so many ways, there is one universality. One day you don't have her, and then the next day you do. It has nothing to do with how old the child is when you become parent and child, or the circumstances of the child's birth or arrival. In my case, as soon as Annika was born, the hellish aspects of the pregnancy dissipated; to invoke another cliche, once the child is, you have bigger fish to fry. I don't mean you ever forget. Each child's arrival into a family is a universe-sized story. But the story becomes background noise so quickly you can't believe it when you have these moments remembering how large it all loomed beforehand.

Anyway. I digressed again. And that may be the first time I have ever used the past tense of "digress." (The digression seems to be feeding off of itself.) What I was going to say was Annika. Flat on her back in a slightly pilly pale pink sleeper, breathing in the tiniest even puffs, her tiny hands in loose, relaxed fists, already a person. How did this happen? How is it that I already have to really really try to remember before her? I mean, I can--of course I can remember what it was like before I had any children. But it does seem strange, still, and I don't mean to belabour the obvious, that one hot day last summer, as I lay in the reclining chair trying to visualize a child's face, countenance, being, she was not. And now she is. And yes, it happened so very, very fast.

Tonight, I let Oscar Wilde rest on his weary laurels. I want to remember this moment: me, standing over a navy blue Pack-and-Play in a dining room on West 16th Street wearing a sweatshirt I've had for twenty years, looking down at this perfect little person and listening to her breathe.