Whither my girl?

My chatterbox seems to have gone into hiding. From when she was only a few weeks old, you could hold her head in your hands and coo back and forth with her for ages (ages = 15-20 min in baby-time). Early last week she began to increase the volume of her hiyas, gurgles, tongue-rolls, and ha-uuiuuhhhs, but she's gone strangely quiet of late.

It's hard not to ask myself if I did something wrong. Did I make her more passive by wearing her in the sling too much? Am I not playing enough or engaged enough with her? Am I letting her sleep too long because it's convenient for me? Did we shush her too much? ... I suspect these to be foolish questions driven by my perfectionism, not by her good.

Or is she just becoming more interested in observing the world and therefore splitting her time between quiet observation & playing with lips, palate, and tongue?

I don't know her well enough to say. She is my enigma as well as her own. We stare at each other: I, wondering who I'm seeing; she, wondering at her seeing, but perhaps not yet at me.

The Sea

It seems that sometimes, for her, existence is so overwhelming that it feels like a burden, and then she cries and cries, sputtering, choking, gasping for air like a drowning woman. And I lean over her, wanting to throw her my self as a lifeline, but perhaps offering her only more waves of the sea to buffet her little soul. She stares at me with incomprehension widening her eyes and grimacing her face. She is dry, recently sated with food, and not in physical pain, but she has been gripped by something outside of her control, let alone her understanding. To be held is her deepest desire; all else is the vast, heaving sea: my murmurs and little touches, my fingers stroking her forehead, my eyes locked woth hers, my arm cradling her body in the car seat, all wind and waves to her. But still I must buffet her with my presence, for I have nothing else to give. And since she has been given to me and I to her, I know that is enough to be faithful to the call that is also the gift. I cannot mend this plight, but it is not mine to mend. It is mine to bear with her, and hers to bear with me.

Christmas and other babies

Christmas was low-key - we just hung out with baby while the rest of the family were elsewhere celebrating. They eventually brought us some of the dinner and cuddled Al while we ate it. I cried while listening to Sixpence None the Richer's "Last Christmas". I thought more about the vulnerability of the Son as a wee baby and the incomprehensible humility of that (diapers! spitup! can't hold his own head up!). I thought of the women of the past and around the world who may have lost their baby in the kind of labor I could have had sans drugs, and the blessing of the knowledge we have of the human body and how to help labor along.

I remembered Eve's "with the help of the Lord I have brought forth a manchild" - not a mere platitude of thanks. She had never seen a baby born before; no experienced mother was available to explain to her how to help her bear the pain and what the process would be like. More and more I wonder if "the help of the Lord" was quite direct and engaged in an embodied fashion of some sort--an incredible mercy in what appears to be the grip of the curse. In Paradise Lost, Eve contemplates killing herself so that she won't spread the curse to other humans born of her, but our God is bigger than mere damage control. Amazing. Still thinking about this - Eve and Mary and the seed of the woman.