Last year, when I was four weeks pregnant, my husband and I went to the Christmas service at Grace Church. The little boy leading the choir stepped into the church and opened his mouth to sing the opening line of "Once in Royal David's City."
Once in royal David's city stood a lowly cattle shed,
where a mother laid her baby
in a manger for his bed:
Mary was that mother mild,
Jesus Christ her little child.
I promptly burst into tears and sobbed for two hours straight.
When we were putting the baby's room together a few months later, I had another two-hour crying jag, brought about by the Guys and Dolls song "More I Cannot Wish You" on the stereo.
Uncle Arvide sings it to Sarah, who thinks she should marry a responsible, noble man rather than the gambler she's in love with. It starts:
Velvet I can wish you for the collar of your coat,
And fortune smiling all along your way.
But more I cannot wish you than to wish you find your love,
Your own true love this day.
I wanted exactly that for my son, too: love and happiness and so much more. And he wasn't even born yet.
Another song that reduced me to tears: Mates of State's "Nature and the Wreck," which has the sound of their baby cooing at the end.
Since the wreck, I know more what you need
You need me to put you in the trees
I know we haven't said enough
But I know I've never loved this much
In the midst of all the doctor visits and the crib assembly, it's easy to forget that the whole goal of raising our babies is to prepare them to leave us. Every new development stage, every inch they grow, they're that much closer to not needing us. It's usually some song that knocks that thought into my head (and the wind out of me), but I find myself sideswiped by this fact on a regular basis.
Like once, a couple of months ago, at a dinner party, someone told a story about having once worked as a counselor at a camp for disabled kids. There was one boy there who had everything physically wrong with him a kid can have wrong, but who was extremely happy. Then one day, the counselor read a letter the boy's parents had sent their son. It read: "If we'd been given the choice of any baby in the world, we'd always only have picked you." He handed it to his co-counselor and said, "Quick, read this; it's the meaning of life."
The last lines of Rebecca Barry's essay for us, "Bumpy Road," about her hard pregnancy, are like that.
Then one day you're sitting alone on your porch with your baby inside you and you look up at the birch tree in your front yard. It is autumn, and the leaves are so bright yellow against the white bark, against the blue sky, that you get that sharp surge of joy and sadness you always get when you see something beautiful, especially in the fall when the natural world tells us that death — like birth, like hope, like love — is an inevitable, glorious, soaring thing. "That," you say to your baby, "is what beauty feels like. You'll see when you get out." "You'll love it here," you say, and your heart fills the way it once did when you saw your husband across the room and you knew he was the man you would marry .
Having a baby really does change the way you see everything. I can still recognize Rhett Miller and Ben Kweller as crush-objects, but I now also see them as role models. They're both so in love with their wives, so happy with their kids, so talented. I went with my friend Sarah to a Ben Kweller concert a couple of months ago and I couldn't help thinking of that "More I Cannot Wish You" song. Kweller is a few years younger than me, but I could see him as a baby and as a little boy. His parents must be so proud, I couldn't help thinking, as he bantered about his new family in between terrific songs.
Of course, I've had a baby all of six months. My husband, whose son from his first marriage just turned 13; my best friend, who is just a few years older than me and has three children (the oldest of whom is in high school); my husband's best friend, whose son is 11 — they smile knowingly whenever new parents like me wax philosophical, and they just roll their eyes at the racks of parenting memoirs written by parents whose kids are still in diapers.
They're right, of course — what do we know? But at the same time, I understand the glut of memoirs about pregnancy, about the first year of fatherhood; something about this sudden depth of feeling, the stab of happiness and sadness and hope and fear, feels like wisdom.
This year, our four-month-old baby was with us at the Christmas service. After a few carols, he started to get a little fussy. An older woman in front of us turned around, and I was afraid she was annoyed. Instead, she reached her arms out and, without saying anything, just took him. She and the woman next to her immediately started making him fly between them, making faces. He laughed and laughed and seemed perfectly happy to be out of my arms.
I was so grateful to these strangers admiring and entertaining my baby, and so moved by the hymns (all of which — how had I never noticed? — are about a baby and his mother). But without all the pregnancy hormones surging through my body, I held it together and didn't cry.
Until I got home.