Beginning and End

Sunday afternoon, I drove two towns over to a friend’s house to see their brand new baby.  He was not quite three weeks old. 
 
He was sleeping when I arrived, and I looked down at him, marveling and being reminded at how small newborn babies are… they grow so fast, it’s easy to forget how little they are when they’re born.  [When you’re having them though, they feel huge!]
 
He woke up a short time later, and my friend passed him to me.  His mother said something about how neat it is to see someone who knows what they’re doing pick up a baby, but I didn’t respond because I was almost overwhelmed by the memories that I was feeling.  Yes, I did mean feeling.  It wasn’t that I was remembering particular instances of holding a baby, but holding babies in general.  Which is a visceral thing – my body was remembering what it felt like to hold such a small baby, to carry it, to nurse it, to care for it.  It was a bit overwhelming to tell the truth.
 
I was there a bit longer than I had expected, which was still a rather short visit, but during my short time there, a host of other memories were dug up by our conversation.  I was… well, I’m not sure of the right word for it – jealous is too strong a word since it’s now after-the-fact and there’s no reason to wish things were otherwise for me – nostalgic might be the right word, though nostalgic in the sense of longing for something in the past that you never had in the first place.  You see, they both share so equally in the childcare duties, everything possible short of sharing the breastfeeding duties.  Even that, they work at sharing with dad giving his son a bottle on a regular basis.
 
I never had that.  Though in all fairness, I never expected that.  I grew up expecting there was a rigid gender division in household and childraising duties = the woman did all the work and dad got the fun stuff.  So I can’t really say I’m jealous, because my life has changed and I no longer feel like I’m flying solo in childrearing, but it’s not really nostalgia either, since I never had or expected equality when the kids were younger.
 
But that aside, it was a very satisfying experience to see their son, to see them working together, to see their happiness and pride (behind the slight sheen of exhaustion).
 
Sunday night, I answered the phone to find my husband’s brother on the other end.  I was a bit surprised since we had just gotten an email from him a few days before and calls weren’t too frequent, but it was nice to briefly chat with him before handing the phone over.
 
When my husband came down the stairs asking if he could direct dial to his cousin’s house in Saskatoon (we recently changed long distance providers, so he wasn’t sure what plan I’d gotten), I knew it was bad news.  And probably about his mom.  Though since he didn’t look particularly upset, I guessed that she had just taken a turn for the worse.  My guess was right.
 
He’s now gone to see her.  She’s been ill for a long time now and while I didn’t know her and she didn’t know me because of it, it’s still hard because I know how hard this is on him.
 
Life – we use this word so frequently and casually as in “it’s my life” “what are you doing with your life?” “that’s life!” that it’s easy to forget what it represents until you’re reminded of its beginning and its end.  And sometimes it feels like it will never end… like when you’re stuck in a line, or a boring job, or waiting for something to happen… but it does.  And we tend to forget that.  We don’t want to think about the end because we’re supposedly having such a great time living it that we don’t want the downer of thinking about when it all stops. 
 
Our reluctance as a society to talk about death, even to name it – we have way too many euphemisms for it – does us all a disservice because it is true that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.  But if it’s you’re life, after it’s gone, you have no way of appreciating that sage piece of advice.  And if you don’t see other people die, if we don’t talk about it, if we don’t think about it, then we can’t really appreciate the life that we have, can we? 
 
Even when birth reminds us of the beginning of life, a child’s potential and all of that, it still is easy to think about other things than life when someone has a baby.  When I saw my friend’s baby, it reminded me not of life, it’s beginning, it’s potential, but of me, of how tired I was for the first months, how shocking it was to find oneself a parent, how much my life changed.  Even for my friends, I am thinking about how their lives have changed, how they’re working together, how they’re adjusting.  I am thinking almost nothing about their son’s life. 
 
Maybe the difficulty is that it’s so hard to tell how someone’s life will turn out, to predict what choices they’ll make, what experiences they might have.  And maybe part of the problem in even thinking along those lines, trying to guess what a child’s life will be like, depends so much on class issues that we’re afraid to talk about it.  We’re afraid to recognize that there are class differences.  That the dream that “anyone can grow up to be President” is in fact a falsehood.  Class is very real in North America, even if we don’t name it like the Brits do.  Not everyone has the same advantages.  No matter how hard you try to change that.
 
My children have never grown up with money.  They have had every advantage I have been able to afford them, and I’ve been lucky in some ways in the way my life turned out because I was able to access resources that they and I might otherwise not be able to afford.  Living in the break-even housing at the University meant I paid just a little less for rent than others and had the extra $50 to enroll them in gymnastics class or swimming lessons at the same place.  And they went to an inexpensive summer camp for a few summers because I knew about it because I had been to the same camp when I was young.  But there are still things that my children have not had.  Experiences they have not had that other children have.  I’m not complaining, I think I did well with what I had, and they certainly have had more experiences than other children have.  But to predict their lives as infants would have meant taking my income into consideration.  And that would mean recognizing that I was living below the poverty line.  And recognizing poverty in North America is an unpopular sport.
 
But life happens, every minute, every day whether we think about it or not.