Handle with care

The delivery of your baby brings a whole new person into your life – and creates a whole new you.

Here you are, a new mother. You know, at least vaguely, how it happened – a glance at the calendar, a glass of wine, a hasty retreat to the bedroom.

But what’s harder to fathom is this: you walked into the hospital one person – wearing your university sweatshirt and maternity biking shorts – and came out another. Now you’re wearing a dress that last fitted you some time in your sixth month, and you’re carrying a baby in a car seat.
But more has changed than your clothing and your accessories. You have changed. You have transformed. You have fallen in love with a creature that weighs no more than your gym bag and has ears like your grandfather’s.

You are weepy. You are elated. You feel like you’ve been let in on the secret of the universe: baby. Your baby.

Now you understand. The mother summoning the strength to lift a truck off her daughter: of course. Your sister-in-law refusing to let you hold her new son until complete bodily disinfection had been achieved: perfectly normal. You even understand your mother. Well, you will never understand her penchant for the colour orange and wall-to-wall carpet, but you do, finally, understand the breadth and depth of her love for you.

What is really important suddenly becomes clear. If your priorities are in a pyramid, your baby is at its pinnacle, with everything else falling into place beneath her: husband, job, yoga; clean house is at the bottom; personal hygiene and movies are in the middle; drink dates to catch up with people you don’t really care about, gone entirely.

In the Julia Glass novel Three Junes, a character speaks of a garden that is beautiful to look at but not at all fragrant: “This garden, you know, it reminds me of my life before the girls. Oh, a lovely life, a life of pretty colours and passions. … But to have children … is to plant roses, muguets, lavender, lilac, gardenia, peonies, tuberose, hyacinth … it is to achieve a whole sense one did not priorly know. It is to give one’s garden another dimension. Perfume of life itself.”

In this fragrant garden, Weetbix perpetually smashing under your feet, you are more receptive to joy, to sorrow, to piercing love and to the hundreds of inevitable losses that come with a child growing up. After all, which is more poignant, her first tooth in or her first tooth out? You’ll see. Both will make you laugh, and both will make you cry.