fast-forward, please

Dad – I’m making a little baby box about Lyra’s birthday with some of her hospital stuff. I wanna include a paragraph from you about remembering when she was born or when you first met her. Skip the trauma part.

There’s a picture of a baby on the kitchen windowsill at my daughter’s house. It’s small and round and cropped in an outline of Lyra’s six-month-old face. Her eyes are scrunched closed. The photograph itself is attached to a popsicle stick, and this allows it to stand in a clay pot, sharing space with an aloe plant. It is just one of a couple dozen shots of Lyra, spanning her first year of life, still to be found, now over two years later, in odd spaces around their house. Lyra looking surprised, Lyra mid-laugh, Lyra in sunglasses. Lyra with a small teddy-bear bandage holding tiny oxygen tubes as small as new stems of grass, onto her blush cheek. There are no photos of the feeding tube, none showing the nickel-sized electrodes dominating her small chest, none taken at the NICU.

All of those photos, all of those Lyra-adorned cupcakes, had once been frosted and laid out on a fold-up table along with the other party food, the pizza and cookies and cake. The birthday cake had a single candle that day, marking a year, a tally of emotions that come with a first child, for Amarinda and Brendan, and a first grandchild for Sandi and me. Gathered that bright and lush September Saturday in Maine, which was bravely holding onto the last of that summer’s warmth, were Lyra’s uncles and aunts, cousins and friends, all there to celebrate an infant turned one. She sat on a dozen different laps, sampled most of the food, and was generally unaware of the fuss and festivities unfurling around her. Every first birthday party is for the adults after all, to see each other, to catch up, the how’s the new job and I can’t believe he’s almost a teenager conversations, and the common question of, “can it already have been a year since Lyra was born?”  And if there were thoughts of a year prior, when she arrived eight weeks ahead of expectation, well, those past emotions had healed and changed and grown right along with her.

If we had known, those first fraught hours and days of her life, that in twelve short months we’d be eating Lyra-cupcakes and helping her open the many birthday presents she received from us, her devoted legion, it would’ve been less scary. We could collectively have said, “Oh, THAT’s how this works out.” But life doesn’t work that way, does it. The Buddhists tell us to stay in the moment. To be mindful and dwell in the present. Be now. But in some cases, being able to glimpse just a whisper ahead, would be good for the soul.

Dedicated to Flor, who says I shouldn’t just write about Montessori.