Eternity Now
Catalina Rose Goldin Arosemena, my wife and I's first child, was born on February 25 of this year. Today is her three month birthday!
For many years before becoming a parent myself, I would ask people I knew who were parents how they felt about having kids and what it was like. I asked probably dozens of parents this question over the years, and every single one of them gave me some variation on the same response: "kids are expensive, they're stressful, they take up all your time... And it's the best thing I've ever done that I wouldn't trade for anything." The uniformity of this response across dozens of interviews furnishes an obvious evidentiary basis for a hypothesis that becoming a parent makes you insane. Having now run the same experiment (parenthood) on myself, I can confirm the finding holds true in me, too.
The Experience of Time
Time is experienced in a new way, now. My daughter at three months of age is a genuine baby, but when she was born she was more like a little homunculus, or a screaming potato like something out of Harry Potter. I called her "My Fussy Monkey Who Escaped From The Zoo (Who I'm Not Giving Back To The Zoo)". But she isn't a homunculus or a screaming potato or indeed a newborn, anymore. She's an infant now, and I never would have imagined that I could care one iota for the difference in those things until I realized my own daughter had passed through that amazing, terrible, and unconscionably cute phase without my ever having had occasion to properly tender it a goodbye. I blinked and it was gone. I'm going to blink again and she'll be driving. I recognized this phenomenon of time slipping ever faster through my fingers long ago, as many do, but I was never slapped across the face by it the way I have been lately.
There is a passage in Roberto Bolaño's 2666 which has always stuck with me. I'll quote the entire thing because this is my blog and I can do what I want:
Sometimes, however, as they sat on a café terrace or around a dark cabaret table, an obstinate silence descended inexplicably over the trio. They seemed suddenly to freeze, lose all sense of time, and turn completely inward, as if they were bypassing the abyss of daily life, the abyss of people, the abyss of conversation, and had decided to approach a kind of lakeside region, a late-romantic region, where the borders were clocked from dusk to dusk, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, an eternity, like the minutes of those condemned to die, like the minutes of women who've just given birth and are condemned to die, who understand that more time isn't more eternity and nevertheless wish with all their souls for more time, and their wails are birds that come flying every so often across the double lakeside landscape, so calmly, like luxurious excrescences or heartbeats. Then, naturally, the three men would emerge stiff from the silence and go back to talking about inventions, women, Finnish philology, the building of highways across the Reich.
Of relevance to us is this notion of people condemned to die (as we all are) "who understand that more time isn't more eternity and nevertheless wish with all their souls for more time." I've always thought that this is a keen observation: a man who wants more time and gets it will want more still as the time he wished for runs short yet again. Generally speaking, what we truly want when we want more time is indeed a form of eternity, and eternity disclaims time; there can be no passage of time in eternity as such. Now hold that thought.
Somebody asked me the other day what the worst parts of being a parent are. There are many aspects of parenthood that are obviously hard, and which one obviously might prefer to forego so that they might enjoy their own fancies as in the time before their child was born. Changing diapers, feeding the baby, rocking them to sleep... Sometimes Catalina requires that one of us rock her in our arms and sing to her for 30 minutes before she can fall asleep, only to wake again instantly in a screaming fit as soon as she is set down in her bassinet. Then the ritual begins again. For a person accustomed to understanding their time as being valuable and filling it with productive endeavors, these tasks can feel like time wasted or at least spent sub-optimally.
And yet.
With my daughter I want more eternity. If changing endless diapers overfilled with a vile green morass or spending 30 minutes at a time like Sisyphus feeding her bottles only to have her puke them all back up again were the only venues available to me for spending time with her, I would attend them eagerly. They would be my favorite moments in my day.
It wouldn't be honest to say that the worst parts of being a parent are indistinguishable from the best parts, but the entire thing is so precious that I would be a fool to forego any part. I can't re-live except in memory the time which has already passed since my daughter's birth, and these memories will continue to unfurl behind me as time unravels before me. The best I can do is to be present, and enjoy eternity with my daughter now, while it's here, whatever that eternity contains.
The Point Of It All
I've never paid much heed to the concepts of "meaning" or "purpose" as they are applied to life. The idea that life has a meaning or a purpose always felt supernatural to me, and I generally don't believe in supernatural things. I've been known to remark that the search for life's meaning is a distraction from life's beauty (or life's absurdity, depending on my mood), so I really wasn't searching for meaning or purpose by having a child. Can you guess where this goes next? Lo and behold, my life is now enameled with purpose and meaning. I can't deny the change in the disposition of my experience.
It's a simple thing: my purpose is her. Her toothless smile is the meaning.
I'm a fortunate man. I have (and always have had) an easy life, and for a long time I've felt free. I have an amazing wife who is discovering herself to be an amazing mother (I always knew she would be). Life is less easy now, that's true enough in a facile way, and you could say my bond to this child makes me less free; I suppose I have to grant you that it does. But remember when I said at the beginning of this that becoming a parent makes you insane? It's true, it does, and I am now insane. Logic does not apply. You can take yours and go home with it. Not for all the stars in the sky would I give up this new life with my daughter. Not for pleasure nor riches nor power nor fame. With my daughter and our happy little family I have an eternity worth living, for as long as it stays with me.
