Beloved son,
Sometimes when I watch you I can’t help but think of Emily Dickinson. It’s time that I introduce you two.
People often get the wrong idea about Emily Dickinson. Morbid, they say. Antisocial, they say. Abstruse, they say.* They’re wrong. Emily Dickinson, I think, was so alive to the world—both earthly and spiritual—that it inspired yet overwhelmed her. She said that true poetry made her feel as if the “top of [her] head were taken off.” I get the sense that just living felt like that to her sometimes, as if she were a raw nerve exposed to the world’s every sensory output.
I see a similar kind of rawness in you, a radical alertness. How else could you be so profoundly fascinated by something as mundane as a whisk? And why else would you need to take a nap every three hours? You must be living with the top off.
But that’s not the main way you remind me of Emily Dickinson. You remind me of her because one day you do not, and the next you do. One day you don’t smile, and the next you do. One day you are all gums, and the next you have two teeth.** One day you’re carpet-bound, and the next you can stand. We can even rewind the tape all the way back and say—miracle of all everyday miracles—that one day you didn’t exist, and the next you did.
That invisible passing between is and was is the kind of magic that Dickinson noticed. I imagine her looking out her window at dusk, wondering about the slice of difference between day and night, light and shadow, when she grabbed her pen to write:
Presentiment — is that long Shadow — on the Lawn —
Indicative that Suns go down —
The Notice to the startled Grass
That Darkness — is about to pass —
Isn’t that just lovely? I often feel like startled grass watching you grow like a weed yourself. Just as the sun sets and that day is no more, almost every day I see you change into a new little person and the old little person is no more. The newborn that cannot roll over is suddenly the baby that cannot crawl is suddenly the toddler that can walk. What? My child of so many days becomes my child of so many months becomes my child of so many years. In my head I know this to be true, yet somehow I still need more warning.
Of course, it’s not like the lawn goes away when the sun sets or the earth actually disappears in the night: in a real sense, you are still the same you today that you were the moment you let out your first cry, no matter how many milestones you reach. But I understand the feeling of loss, the melancholy—in short, the presentiment—in Dickinson’s poem. There is much joy in watching you discover the world and grow into yourself day by day, but there comes with it, too, a startling sensation that something as irretrievable as time itself has just passed by.
Our poet friend captures that feeling even better in another gem:
The difference between Despair
And Fear — is like the One
Between the instant of a Wreck
And when the Wreck has been —
The Mind is smooth — no Motion —
Contented as the Eye
Upon the Forehead of a Bust —
That knows — it cannot see —
Hold on a second, though—don’t think I am saying that I feel despair or fear when I see your incremental steps forward. Don’t think, either, that watching you is ever like witnessing a wreck (except, of course, when you actually do wreck, like by tipping over onto your head or crawling straight into a wall). No, I feel more like the eye on the bust, frozen in time as you accelerate forward. The difference, of course, is that I can see. Mom and I, statuesque compared to you, witness every day your unhindered discovery, marveling as each will becomes is and each is becomes was.
In a few weeks you will turn one year old. One day you are zero, and the next you are one. And when does it happen, really? When the clock strikes midnight? When we again reach December 9 at 6:23 a.m.? Which second did it occur? Which fraction of a moment divides the you that knew the womb from the you that knew the world?
Just as your marvelous little existence raises marvelous big questions, the timing of your birthday—right in the middle of Advent—inevitably turns my mind to even greater mysteries. Not long after your birthday, the world celebrates the birth of the Anointed One, Christ incarnate. The Son of God becomes the Son of Man. One day he is beyond us, and the next he is among us—miracle of all miracles.
So, when we sing “Happy Birthday” in a short while and “Joy the World” a short while after that, I suppose those marble lips of mine should turn up into a smile, for a moment is passing but another, better one follows. For as much as she pondered the fine distinctions of our transient existence, I wonder it ever dawned on Emily Dickinson that presentiment is just a shade darker than hope.
*I was hoping your first word might be “abstruse.” “Mama” won out by a considerable margin.
**Okay, maybe Mom and I could have watched the gradual progress on this one more closely, but we genuinely had no idea that you had any teeth until the pediatrician pointed them out. Sure enough, there were two ridged caps poking through your gums. I’m fairly certain you willed them into existence somewhere between the parking lot and the doctor’s office.