Apart from love and patience, being a parent seems to require flexibility more than anything else. In many ways I find that my wife and I are acting like a zipper, taking turns to care about our baby and connecting with each other to seal the space of love we are carrying. It is a round-the-clock happily busy tiring life, that only occasionally is interrupted by a brief moment of peaceful silence and solitude. Now is one of those moments; my wife is lying on our bed sleeping after a night when she was awake most of it, my baby is finally sleeping in his little baby nest after having spent a restless hour dozing off, waking up, repeat, in my lap before accepting a deeper state of rest. I am sitting in the sofa looking at them, two fragments of heaven lying in front of me, when the importance of flexibility pops up in my mind.
My next blogpost, what should I write, when should I write it? There will probably not be a better time this week than right now, so the dishes will have to wait, our sweet baby’s little accidents from last night that require advanced washing techniques can also wait. The floor that needs to be properly dedusted will also have wait a little longer and lunch – I can just do a quick pasta today. All in all this is the perfect time to write and capture this moment in time when our soon to be four weeks old son is sleeping on gauze with bears that was a gift from grandma, when my wife’s beautiful grey hair rests on a pillow with small brown dots, when I have hang one of my wife’s dresses in the window to make the room not so bright, when outside I can hear the construction workers moving what hears to be metal pipes from somewhere to somewhere else, when the traffic on the highway after a busy morning seems to be starting to flow again and the tissue extending from the tissue box on the herring bone patterned table in front of me is slowly fluttering in the breeze from the air conditioning unit; a moment when time is happening but nothing else, like a still image with a slowly undulating background, noise of the world waiting for life to start again. Waiting for our little boy to wake up wanting to have milk.
Maybe I have time for another cup of coffee or maybe the signals from the lorry outside indicating that it is reversing will wake up our baby, maybe I will write one more paragraph or maybe the little legs moving under the blanket is an indication that the silence is soon over, maybe the little hand looking for the mouth is a sign that self comfort is no longer enough. As well a writing when there is a few minutes of life over, leaving a story in the middle is also a required skill for a dad it seems, and being a person who tends to overdo things, wanting to do them perfectly rather than do them half heartedly (or middle road half end in Japanese), this is maybe my biggest challenge as a father. But I am sure that when
Share this post