Special

 

 

So this is happening these days.

We got some chicks on Echo's birthday. I had forgotten how downright cute little chicks can be. So sleepy! So earnest in their pecking! So weak and vulnerable! So loud! We have them in our mudroom where sometimes the peeping gets so big and insistent that Nathan trundles in and scoops them into a baby sling and wears them around the house.

Little babies.

But one of these little babies, the one above, named Penguin, is special. This little girl, at the slightest suggestion, reclines on her back and passes out. She becomes the slackest sack of sand. When she's fully reclined we can pass her around, walk around, and she never stirs from her limp, soggy, slumber.

It's totally unreal.

I don't exactly know where I'm going with this. I know that I feel fond of this little chick. I feel special about her. I feel like she is special. But then when I check in with my family members they feel special about different chicks. Nathan is partial to Earl, the littlest one. Xi is partial to Goldilocks, the yellowest one. 

It reminds me of when Echo was a baby and a friend came over with her new baby. We put them on the floor and marvelled at their special perfectness. At one point my friend "ooohed" about something and I was curious as to why. I imagined that my baby Echo did something especially cute and I wanted to hear about it, but when I followed her eyes she was watching and ooohing over her baby. 

We all feel special about our special someones.

It's fantastic actually. At Echo's soccer games we line up on the sidelines with the rest of the parents. We're all watching the ball, we're all rooting the girls on, but we all have one of our eyes particularly glued to our girl. What a perfect design nature is, making sure that we all feel intensely attached to different beings. We all are securing the survival and flourishment of different beings.

Echo turned seven on Thursday and I felt like no one else in the entire history of the world has ever turned seven. Our baby is no longer a baby. Instead she's a free-thinking, intellectual, highly empathetic, animal and nature loving, audiobook-obsessed, person. Surely that's never happened to anyone else. It's too profound. I feel it too deeply in an aching, panicky, celebratory kind of way.

But of course it does happen for other people. It is happening right now for a million other people. Bajillions of mamas, right now, are nursing their babies, looking them in the eyes and thinking: There is no one as perfect as you in the entire world. Just this weekend, a few blocks from our house, hundreds of parents watched their adult children walk across the stage in caps and gowns, and marvelled at the bestness and specialness of their particular ones. They wiped tears from their faces and never saw a more beautiful sight.

It's totally unreal.

How much love we feel for our special someones. 

How much love we collectively feel. All that love pulsing and throbbing and jumping in huge spikes over chubby cheeks, popsicle stained upper lips, round bellies in bathing suits, hair perfectly pulled into clips, stumbles, leaps, new boyfriends, new skills, graduations, and weddings. 

They are special, our special ones. Yet it's totally not special to love them, to almost crack apart with the enormity of it. That's happening, everywhere, every day. How can this be? How can that hugeness of feeling be invisible? How is it not popping and splattering all over us all? How are we stepping through it, doing ordinary things, saying perfectly normal sentences, with this streaming through our veins?

It's totally unreal.

Comments

[6512 and growing]

Isn't that pull towards our kids such an efficient, effective evolutionary reality? Love how you lay it out. Happy birthday to such a special little growing person!

[Jessi]

Oh my goodness! Just totally gave me goose bumps. The enormity of it. I think we sometimes forget that there is all that love out there, and instead focus on the negative. Beautiful. Thanks so much for sharing.

[jennifer]

Beautifully, beautifully put. And on a subject -- love -- that is so difficult to put into words. Especially words that are accurate and descriptive and fresh.
I have thought similar things and just almost burst apart by the wonderfulness of it -- funny enough, also at soccer practice for my little guy. There's a mother of one of his teammates (who just happens to have autism) who so clearly fiercely loves her son and is so dedicated to his well-being and supporting who he is, just as he is ... and I remember thinking last week, "Wow -- she feels about him the way I feel about my son! Wow. And ... at the same time ... not wow. It's ALL of us!"
On a related note, I thought of you, Natalie, when I read the story in The New York Times about Ron Suskind and his son, entitled "Reaching My Autistic Son Through Disney" -- the degree of empathy he and his wife and firstborn son used to connect with their youngest son/brother, Owen, was powerful to read about. How they all went to the place where he was, where he loved (Disney movies, as it happens) to find a way to be with him and to communicate with him and understand him ... pretty cool. (The video in that story is particularly illuminating.)