(Rhys)
Life is very good.
He looks much better after a bath and a good night's sleep. Well, I guess that he does. So far all he's had is a bath. The phrase "sleeping like a baby" is already taking on very different meanings for me. It's like the phrase "... eats like a bird," one that has no bearing whatsoever on the actualities. If sleeping like a baby is meant to mean "in 1 hour intervals, or less, broken up by feeding and adorable gurgling and cooing" then I somehow never gathered that message from it before.
There is much to say about this experience but I am still trying to take all of it in, or even part of it. It is immense, though not "larger than life" as too many people say. But it is rather the exact size of life, in its currently condensed form. The range of feelings is overwhelming. That's why you hear so many people speaking of it in only hyperbolic terms, I guess. It's rare that you ever have an experience engage you on so many different levels all at once, the result is understandably enormous. I have been swept up by it in one way or another for "days on end" now. It is a form of shocking euphoria, it hits you in waves of pleasure and satisfaction, but can also send your thoughts both near and far into the future, in preparation, even fear.
The little guy's safety is almost all I can think of sometimes. Soon I will need to learn to breathe, relax, and believe that all the necessary steps have been taken. But the mind can be a vigilant pest, and mine has yet to relax, it's like a Jack Russell terrier on alert.
The thing that I found most interesting, or at least very interesting, is how I've prepared myself for this moment for many months, or at least I thought that I had. Then all of a sudden a new creature is in front of me and I have an immediate love for it. An almost indescribable level of love, as well. I would already do anything I can for him, as his mother has been doing for months, and I've been witness to from the outside, all along. But now he's here and I'm falling all over myself to be of some use to the little guy. I am the portrait of "a fish out of water." I am a mass of bumbling cliches.
The phrase, "love at first sight" comes to mind but that is also a hackneyed term and one that is most often used to describe romantic love. But there it is, it really is love at first sight. Never before have I been so able to build a reservoir of love for a human that I don't know, have only seen in sonogram snapshots, or little clips on a video monitor at the doctor's office, as if the unborn child was walking somewhere on the moon. Now it's returned from floating in space and I'm ready to throw him a ticker-tape parade. But he seems to mostly like tits and swaddling blankets, for now.
Just when I thought I had it all figured out, he's got his little fingers right on the pulse of it all....
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