Beloved daughter,
Looking at you today—eight months old, crawling and standing and exploring like mad—it’s hard to reckon just how recently it was that you were a completely different you. The rapidity of your growth combined with the slowness of my writing means it’s easy for me to miss out on capturing many, many developments. But before you leap ahead too far, let’s rewind the tape for a moment to revisit that distinct but fleeting phase, the fourth trimester.
Contradictory term, isn’t it? There’s no third half in a soccer match, no fifth quarter in the Super Bowl, so how come a “fourth trimester”?
The basic idea is that when a full-term baby is ready to be born, she isn’t ready to be born. She’s viable and developed and taking up about as much room as she can, but nonetheless she’d much rather ignore the eviction notices that keep slipping under the door and instead stay put right where she is in her cozy little studio for another three months.
The theory goes that human babies long ago actually did stay in the womb closer to 12 months, but that over time our evolved jumbo brains necessitated an early departure if the baby was to fit through the exit. This theory explains why, for instance, a newborn horse plops onto the ground and starts walking almost immediately whereas a human baby seems entirely out of their element upon arrival, as if they’d arrived on the wrong planet.
I think of that scene in The Matrix when Neo is “born” into the non-simulated world. It’s a rough entry. His pale, hairless body, accustomed to its warm, gooey cocoon, is unplugged from his bio sac, flushed down a tube, dropped off a ledge into a pool of water he can’t swim in, and, helpless as a rubber toy, hoisted away by a giant claw. That captures some of the rudeness of what you had to do—almost unbelievably, what every person has to do—to make it into this world.
Neo’s journey isn’t done there, though. After a period of convalescence, Neo is told the truth about the harsh world he now inhabits. His response? He staggers backward, sick to his stomach. He can’t yet bear the reality he’s been born into. He needs time to learn, to process, to develop unused muscles. He is still in the fourth trimester.
In your first three months, we had all manner of names for you: mouse, button, nugget, burrito, scone—basically anything that fits in one hand. Far and away, though, the one pet name that best captures that first stage of life is alien.
I know—not the cutest term for one’s daughter. But hey, there are some mega-cute aliens out there. ET? Adorable. Baby Yoda? Off the charts cute. (And yes, we sometimes called you Baby Yoda, too.)
More important than the cuteness readout, the metaphor of alien just fit the bill better than any other description. In so many ways, you were our little visitor from inner space.
I’m not the only parent to have thought of this, by the way. Lots of resources describe birth and the ensuing transition as bringing baby “earthside.” The term isn’t used to emphasize how bizarre or unwelcome a new baby is in the world—people instinctively rejoice over newborns, and for good reason—but rather how bizarre and unfamiliar the world is to a new baby.
During and even after the fourth trimester, the world remained profoundly strange to you. Take for instance your diet. Until recently, every snack and meal of your life consisted of the same exact thing, no exceptions. Almost anything else—even water, the most abundant compound on Earth—would make you sick.
That arrangement doesn’t strike me as altogether hospitable. If I (the sci-fi version of me, that is) crash-landed on a foreign planet covered in trees that grew a bountiful, never-ending yield of delicious-looking food, only to find that I could eat literally none of it without growing ill, I might question my odds of survival.
As a crash-lander, you also lack the energy to last one Earth day, or even a significant fraction of one. If you go more than two hours awake, the fuss switch flips on. If you pushed it to three hours, I think I’d have to submerge you in water to prevent nuclear meltdown.[1]
Then there are all these oddities in your body compared to ours. Your breath always smells sweet, and your poop always smells like yogurt. You have cartilage instead of kneecaps, gums instead of teeth, and instead of one solid skull, six continental plates biding their time before forming Pangea.
When you were itty bitty, your brain and body weren’t on speaking terms: Your arms would jump and flail without your consent, your eyes would roll around as if trying to focus on something not there, and your head, were it not for our constant hand of support, would have swung around on your neck like a tetherball in the wind.
Early on, your body also had a radical continuity, a freedom from barriers, that I can hardly understand. You had just emerged from an environment of constant nourishment, free from hunger and therefore free from meals, free from routine, from timing, from clocks, a world without sunrise or sunset, a realm where light may have intrigued but darkness reigned. You had spent all of your life till then connected to another, part of another, inside another.
What a strange, strange thing to suddenly be flung into a world of divisions—light and dark, day and night, hungry and full, me and you. Otherworldly indeed.
But here is the amazing thing. In spite of this radical difference, even on your first day earthside you and I already shared radical likeness. I, too, was a little alien like you not terribly long ago, and not terribly long from now you, too, will grow to be a fully functioning adult like me.
Even now, before you’ve grown into that person, from a genetic point of view we are really similar. Like, really similar. Geneticists report that “between any two humans, the amount of genetic variation—biochemical individuality—is about .1 percent.” Biochemically, you share more than 99% similarity with any other person in the species.
And, out of those billions of people with whom you are, genetically, mostly indistinguishable, no one save your brother, my parents, and my siblings is as similar to me as you are.
So you—our little visitor from inner space, totally foreign to this world, its divisions, its pace, its customs, its physical laws, its language—you in fact bear my and Mom’s image more exactly than virtually every human, every creature, in all of history. We are radically different and radically alike, absolutely far and near at the same time.
Of course, that is my condition, too, and Mom’s, and every person’s. I don’t mean just in relation to each of our parents; I mean in relation to our Maker. The same braid of difference and likeness is woven into all of our DNA in the fact that we are utterly unlike God yet more resemble Him than any other thing on the planet. We are made for Heaven but bound to Earth. We are divinely inspired but so obviously un-divine.
C.S. Lewis gets at this paradox in The Four Loves, where he distinguishes between “nearness by likeness” and “nearness by approach.” Our nearness by likeness comes pre-installed: As creatures, we resemble our Creator. We bear His image without knowing or trying. And yet, in terms of nearness by approach, in how we imitate God in word, thought, deed, and character, we remain radically distant from Him.
“For what can be more unlike,” Lewis writes of the chasm between Creator and creature, “than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?” (4)
And yet God does not leave us on the far side of that chasm. He comes to us, and He bids us come to Him. Theologians call this the paradox of transcendence and immanence. God transcendent, the exalted One, the Most High, our sovereign Lord almighty, is also God immanent, God incarnate, come to earth, born in a manger, clothed in flesh, dwelling in our hearts. God above us is also God with us.
And if I think that you as a newborn were a stranger in a strange land when you first came to us, I can only imagine the alienation that Jesus must have underwent to be born into this world, into our hearts. It has about it not just paradox or puzzlement, but absolute mystery—the visitor from heavenly space.
Like most mysteries, I find that the mystery of Jesus’ indwelling with us, the paradox of our distance and nearness to God, is best conveyed in art, not theology. And so I leave off with a song that I would often listen to while rocking you to sleep during those first months of your life.
In “The Lion’s Mane”, a beautiful piece by Iron & Wine, I always gravitated toward these lines:
Love is a tired symphony you hum when you’re awake
Love is a crying baby mama warned you not to shake
Love is the best sensation lying in the lion’s mane
I would listen to these words as I held you close in my arms, swaddled in blankets and wrapped in white noise and darkness—the best replica we could manage of your life in the womb, that cozy world you so abruptly had to leave. I would look at you, my daughter, your tiny, strange, sacred body, and feel so connected to you, so near. We could hardly be closer.
I would ponder how the fullness of a symphony can live in a quiet hum; how a crying baby is and isn’t the person she will become; how the lion, fierce and terrible, is to those it loves soft and safe.
I would at times be struck by my twin existence as father to you and child of our Father—foreign to this strange world, needy and powerless, yet perfectly snug and known and near.
[1] Your endurance has increased with age. I think at the time of publishing this, you can last up to four hours before your molecular integrity starts to break down.
Addendum: Mom wanted me to be sure to point out that for as odd a little bug you were, your brother was even more like an alien when he was born. I mean, look at those hands. They’re made for a Spielberg scene.
