A new baby in the family is a forceful disruption of the status quo. They are adorable agents of chaos. They bring with them the tidal force to break us out of the customs of our comfortable and quiet lives. They also change us fundamentally, awakening a buried subroutine that silently clicks into action when we first hear the tiny wail that is the battle cry of new life. I have always guessed that babies undid the quotidian rhythms of their families. I never realized their ability as cute little incendiaries or their power to forge their families into new people. I have discovered this truth empirically. Our family just welcomed a tiny bundle and her joyful arrival has engaged an unstoppable paradigm shift in all of us, irrevocably updating our family roles.
As I reflect on all the members of our extended family that have brought children into this world, I now realize I had no idea at all just how significant their new baby was for them or their immediate relatives. A baby is like a nuclear bomb, except instead of alpha particles and nuclear winter, they bring life, reality, joy, love, adoration and devotion in megaton units. The pulse of their dainty cries and whimpers evokes a prime biological imperative to protect and surround and teach and love the child at all costs. Age-old prerogatives to stand in stark opposition to the dangerous powers and influences of the outside world, to nurture and impart wisdom, to gaze in worshipful awe at the elfin and delicate fingers and toes and perfect ears, to aid in all the myriad duties of rearing a child kick into high gear among the clan.
I learned something of this power when my brother's children were born. I understood the swelling of paternal adoration, pride and devotion with our own boys. I glimpsed the true entirety of it this past week when our middle son and his wife had their first child, a girl, who has changed my heart forever. I see the world anew. We all do. None of us around her will ever be the same. The swaddled bairn doesn’t know it yet, but she commands a filial army of devotees ready at her lightest whimper to obey at all costs.
Part of that change is that I realize the power of the names we give our familial roles. We use them casually, calling each other grandma or mommy or daddy or pawpaw. They are universal in our culture. Everyone has a nana or grandpop, a ma, a papa, or at least someone who stands in that role. What we rarely think about is the magic behind those words. A new baby cries and suddenly those names take on meaning, they become kinetic, they fire dormant life force within us, we become something else, newer, more powerful, more poignantly human. We suddenly are those names. Fundamentally, we are the same material, like an ingot of steel hammered into a sword, but our use and purpose is altered forever.
I am our new wee one’s daddy's stepfather, so my relationship isn't biological and yet, her Pacific-blue eyes wrought the change in me as well. I am now her PopPop. I have been suffused with a new raison d'être. The transformation has begun and I cannot wait to get to the fullness of my duties. Every other aspect of my life is now permeated with the power of PopPop. I take that power from my own father and grandfathers, placed in my heart and mind by them when I was, in my turn, a tiny person.
My heart is so full of joy with this fresh definition and name that I can hardly express it. Micki is now a grandmother with all the incredible power that the name entails. Our son, his wife are now a father and a mother. Our other sons are uncles, their significant others, aunts, our daughter-in-law’s parents, grandparents in their own right. We all have lives, goals, dreams, responsibilities, commitments and duties, just like anyone. With the birth of our angel every other function we might fulfill in our daily lives now pales by comparison. Neighbors and friends may have little ones and we will celebrate with them the hallmarks and milestones of their children’s lives, but our sweet little warrior princess rules our hearts and minds completely. We are her pious order of servants and teachers. Unless and until she has siblings and cousins, she is our child queen.
As I held her for the first time, I was overwhelmed with emotion. She filled my heart with pure love. I found myself floating, feet not touching the ground. Her life-force thrummed and crackled around me like lightning. I seemed to note tiny flecks of deep fire within her sea grey eyes. Here in a minute bundle of gently wriggling humanity was the powerful reminder of why any of us are here. Suddenly my spirit was lost in a world of endless possibilities, the focal point of which lay snuggling and warm against my chest.
Uncounted timelines stretching out like the millions of branches of a storm tree fracturing into infinite unknowable directions surrounded us both. I saw all the avenues of her life and the intersections where her choices could and would be influenced by all of us. She can be anything she wants to be, of course and I and all of her family members have the power and responsibility to aid her on her quest. In that second of realization, though, I knew my own role was to be there for her in any way possible.
When it was time to hand over my new little granddaughter to Micki, her Mimi, nothing was the same for me. I am not the same person who walked into the hospital that day. I am now a repository of life experiences at her beck and call; a walking library of stories, lessons, comfort and love. I can teach her, help her, love her through all that life has to bring her. Each word I say, every choice I make, each breath I and all of us in her orbit take in and exhale will influence and leave an impression on her.
Our lives, our dreams, our hopes and fears are now dramatically adjusted to take into full consideration this one small human, as yet unaware of her own potential. This is, to me, the closest thing to a miracle we will ever find on earth.
It is natural, I think, to yearn to be part of something larger than ourselves and in the obedience to this impulse, we seek things that lead us astray or leave us empty or cynical and bitter. The wish to depart the material burdens and physical needs is, as Leon Trotsky put it in his essay on literature, required to keep humanity from stagnation. To transcend the merely mortal boundaries of pain and hunger and suffering is perhaps the most human desire. I have the solution. It does not reside in a holy text or revered cave or in the words of a sage on a mountaintop.
Rather, it is the face of a newborn where we find our own promise, our own potential and our own devotion to our lives and our source of meaning for future generations. For me and those of us gathered around the little life clutched to her mother and father in loving embrace, that purpose has never been more clear. This is not the deluded ranting of the doctrinaire or the casuistry of a false prophet. This is nature, bound within the webbing of which is the promise of all life and the security of our species.
This child and all children are the magical source of our power, but we often forget it or at least take it for granted. We become wrapped up in questions of superiority or superstition; we loudly boast this or that dogma, willing, as it were, to thrust ourselves on swords made of dusty lies rather than understand the true, unparalleled wealth that comes from gazing lovingly at a tiny newborn and all the promise that it entails.
This child—our new granddaughter —is now at the center; she abides in the nucleus of our clan. She holds the promise of decades undreamed of and of life and experience that we will never see. She will carry each of us with her as she grows into the flower of adulthood and in turn bears her own children and celebrates her own grandchildren. I will live in her memory, and so will each of us. Perhaps, though it is egotistical to say it, she will impart to her offspring stories of her PopPop and Mimi, as we will impart our own stories of our ancestors to her.
More sacred than any chalice or mystical rite or ceremony, this child will become a receptacle for our lives which she will carry with her as stories and genetic memory. What could be more precious, more hopeful, more akin to immortality?
And yet, now she slumbers, gently writhing to the stimulus of infant dreams. Our hearts now beat as one with hers in all places and in all things. This is how it should be.
And from the day of her birth, I too am newly born with her and see the world anew.
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