Driving Home

After we'd completed our interminable purgatory in the hospital, which included breast feeding classes, (males need not go, though I was there for the blow by blow while Sadie, unlike the well behaved child in the bassinet proceeded to cry until I rocked her to sleep)and nurses us showing how to finger feed our hungry little urchin.

Driving home we noticed that all the trees had lost there leaves. We were greeted by bare, skeletal things where only a scant few days earlier the park had been awash in gold. I discovered houses I had forgotten about, hidden as they were for eight months of the year behind a the veil of now lifted leaves. And as we drove home with our little grumbler sleeping peacefully in the back seat all the familiar streets looked changed because we were seeing them through new eyes. I suppose that is one of the good things about child birth for the adult, it marks the rebirth of that old familiar world yet again. What I mean to say is that everything felt different, and it was good.

Before we left the hospital we took pictures of little Sadie on her last day, trying to catch her between screaming fits. At home, we took pictures of her in the car seat before she started crying. It is strange how we obsessively create with cameras moments that occur so rarely. Most of the most beautiful things she does occur when the video camera is off but how to tell anyone that. To show them the moment when I turned her towards the mirror and our foreheads came together as we stuck out our tongues in unison, united in the smallest of ways. These things will never be recorded and like every memory they will disappear and be reborn as something different down the road.

The point that I'm trying to make is that everyone should get to drive a child home from the hospital. If only to remember that it is possible for the world to change in an instant.