29 Days Later

Today is the day between the harvestbaby being four weeks old and the harvestbaby being one month old. You will allow me the micro-focus of that level of detail, I am sure. I am sure, too, that neither the señor nor I can remember much prior to these four weeks. I was pregnant, I think, and at work. I had no road-map.

Some things have prepared me well. Union work has the same kind of ever-coming intensity and changes of plan beyond my control as occur when looking after a baby. Keeping dogs has introduced us over several years to continually-interrupted sleep and inured us to the vagaries of the body and its emissions. My past experience of surgery prepared me for the way that the body, once altered, returns slowly and only to an approximation of what it was previously. These things are mostly shadows compared to the intensity of our present reality, but they are helpful shadows nonetheless.

I am so glad to have been pitched deep into the material experience of life, in a way that hasn’t been available to me for years and years. I’m sure one of the things that appealed to me about the life of the mind even when I wasn’t yet a teenager was the way it enabled me to withdraw from unmediated relationships, peer-to-peer, which were by and large complicated, truncated and hurtful. (It never occurred to me that this is often the way of twelve-year-old girls; I simply assumed it was me.) Out from under the cover of ideas I have the responsibility now of caring for this little one and also, I hope, giving her the kind of resources with which she can cope with things that took me years longer to learn.

I think she is already on the way to being smarter than her mother, or, at the very least, more attuned to the shadow that, in this shot, might be playing across the ceiling.