Tag: newborn

Visitor from Inner Space

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.

Our first visitor from inner space

Born in a Pandemic

Beloved daughter,

You were born on the eve of a pandemic. Well, not quite the eve—three days prior, to be precise.

Two months before you were born, I had heard on the radio of a new virus spreading through Wuhan, China. It was half a world away, as innocuous to me as an NPR soundbite. A few people were talking about the virus spreading to the US through Washington State and how we needed to stock up on hand sanitizer and face masks. These lone voices were a small minority and, frankly, they sounded kind of paranoid.

Well, they were right.[1] To spare you the details—and if you really want those, I’m sure you can dig up the many libraries’ worth of news coverage produced in the past few months—I will say that I don’t know anyone who has lived through anything like this before. They call it a once-in-a-century disease. Seemingly everyone on the planet has been touched by it, if not directly, then indirectly thanks to the lockdowns that have driven people stir crazy and sent the economy reeling.

For our family specifically, we have been very slightly affected compared to many, many others. As I write this, Mom and I both still have our jobs. Our health is good. We know very few people who have contracted the disease, and no one who has died from it.

In our daily routines, life is different in odd ways. Mom hasn’t been to a grocery store since before you were born. We haven’t had a friend set foot in our house in months. Your brother has developed an acute shyness toward strangers that we’re not sure to attribute to his stage of development or to the corona spooks. When we do see people, we visit in the front yard or from the safety of our door as they stand awkwardly in the driveway. We play board games and do escape rooms online. Evening walks feel like a game of live-action Pac-Man where everyone’s a ghost. And handshakes and hugs? Quaint, if not bygone customs, it would seem.

For you in particular, the main effect of the pandemic is that you’ve led the life of a hermit. By the time your brother was your age, he had been all over. He had taken photos at your uncle’s crowded Christmas light display, ushered in the new year with friends and family, accompanied me and Mom each week to an ultimate Frisbee match in a busy gymnasium, and road tripped to Colorado to see family. The only public place you’ve visited is a doctor’s office.

But what do you care? After all, your brother didn’t get much from those early experiences. Like you, he was still developing vision beyond a foot or two in front of his face. Fortunately, I suppose, your world is so small right now that being “quarantined” inside a two-bedroom home is as restrictive as a criminal being “imprisoned” in the northern hemisphere: there is still a whole lot to explore.

In the cloistered little life you’ve had so far, what seems significant about the pandemic is not what you have missed in the world, but what the world has missed in you. As people begin to re-emerge like startled turtles from their shells, they are entering a world where you are no longer a newborn, and that is a loss indeed. Virtually everyone, most of our family even, has missed out on that brand new baby magic.

I don’t mean to say you aren’t magic now. You are still way cute, probably cuter now than you were at the start. Now you are doing things like smiling and cooing and laughing—oh, your laughter! If they could bottle that stuff, they could fly rocket ships with it.

But there is something uniquely awesome—not just “neat,” I mean, but worthy of awe—about a newborn, as if the mark of the Creator’s hand is easier to spot. For how little you did in your first weeks of life, it was amazingly hard to look away from you. It was like noticing the details of a flower for the very first time. You were simply exquisite, and insanely fragile, and abounding in lines and contours and shades and expressions that we had never, ever seen. We would stare at you to try to learn your face, this little creature we had glimpsed only in dreams and ultrasounds.

Thanks to COVID, people have also missed out on holding you at your littlest. Again, you still love to be held and I still love to hold you, but it was different in the beginning. For one, your body was crazy small. Eight pounds? Are you kidding me? That’s less than my head, and I carry that thing around all the time.

You had such scarce control over those eight pounds, too. Your limbs moved unpredictably, your eyes wandered aimlessly. You were constantly slumped, a total slave to gravity. Without the steadying of our hands, your body was always making its way down to the next solid surface, like one of those Plinko discs on The Price is Right. You were the very image of helplessness.

If you weren’t crying or eating, you were sleeping, and we gobbled up our chances to have that happen when we were holding you. I swear, there is no pleasure more serene than falling asleep with a newborn dozing on your chest.[2] If virtual reality one day upgrades to Holodeck status, that is the first program I will download.

Everything about you at that age—your warbly cries, your constant fatigue, your insatiable appetite for closeness—it all expressed a sort of trust that is unique to a brand new human: unique, I think, because it was neither conferred nor earned but simply necessary. It was part of your makeup, by design, to need us. What choice did you have but to fall asleep in our arms? Whose else’s arms would you fall asleep in?

Yes, it’s true that you still don’t really have a choice in the matter, but now, larger and more “with it” and, if I’m honest, more humanlike than you were those first few weeks, your radical dependence doesn’t carry quite the same poignancy that it once did. The first hints of independence, albeit subtle, have poked through. You lift your head off the floor; you fix your gaze; you hold onto objects. Your helplessness diminishes day by day.

It’s a development, obvious and inevitable as it is, that makes me both beam and tear up. I am proud to watch you make sense of yourself and this world you’ve been born into, yet sad to say goodbye to that tiny, exquisite, needful girl.

Don’t get me wrong—the pride is nearly continual, the sadness but occasional. Watching you grow is little loss and mostly gain.

There are moments, though, when I wish I could just stop the train, when I wish I could take a photo and jump into the frame to live there forever. But then you would never become the girl, the woman, that you were made to be, and the world would always be stuck in a pandemic, plagued, among many other ailments, by the inability to meet my darling daughter.

It’s not an exchange I’d ever be willing to make. The world has already missed out on too much.



[1] Mostly right. At first, it was reported that the virus entered through Washington, but it was later discovered that, like a thief in the night, it had entered through California some time earlier without detection. This is one among millions of little facts that have been reported ad nauseum, minutia that normally would go unnoticed by the majority of the public but, in this period of heightened anxiety and endless time at home, have been wolfed down like fistfuls of popcorn.

[2] PSA: When you grow up, don’t ever fall asleep like that with your own baby (or anyone else’s, for that matter) unless there is another adult in the room. When Mom or I napped with you, the other one always stayed awake, lest you slid off our chest or our twentyfold weight rolled over on top of you.