Wonderfully banal

So, do you want to see a picture of my kid?

How that question gets answered is pretty revealing. It seems to polarize people into those who are eager and those who are grudging. Mind you no one ever refuses outright. I guess new parents are perceived to be a bit touchy. Go figure.

I can understand this. Kids embody one of the basic dichotomies of human existence. On the one hand they are utterly miraculous and on the other there's nothing more banal. The ability to create new life, a whole new person with unique thoughts and emotions is astounding. I have trouble wrapping my head around the idea and I'm having even more trouble trying to articulate the wonder of it.

It seems to me that there should be more to it. You should have to complete some great quest, slay the dragon with a rock, climb the mountain alone in winter or cross the ocean on an open raft to be granted such an ability. But it's far easier than that, or at least for the LUC and I it was.
It's that simplicity that has covered the earth with humans. What is it, 6.5 billion and counting? Every one of them born to parents, every one of them a tiny little figure at 14 and half weeks like we saw on the ultrasound. Banal indeed.

I was one of those people who only saw the ubiquitousness of children. I even told my brother when he had his first child "No, you don't need to send me a picture of the baby. At that age they all look the same, send me a picture when he starts looking like a real human." I was, needless to say, an asshole. Sorry Dave.

I still feel that way and yet I've come to understand the amazement too. I'm trying hard to hold these two things at the same time because that's what keeps the sparkle in life, wonder at the banal, seeing the miraculous in the everyday. We get so, well, just plain used to things that we lose sight of their essential nature.

The stars are just as beautiful the thousandth time you see them as they are the first. The only thing that's changed is how you perceive them. You can choose your perceptions, and that's a huge lesson that my unborn child is already teaching me. I hope she (or he) doesn't grade on the curve, turns out I'm a bit of a slow learner.

So, do you want to see a picture of my kid?

In Memory of Owen Hunt Richel

He was six years old and had been battling lukiemia. He died last night. Daryl and Charlotte, his parents, were an example to us all of love, courage and grace in the face of the hardest choices anyone would ever have to make.

I grieve. Less so for Owen because his time might have been short but he was loved fiercely and often and is now out of pain. I grieve for his parents, lovely people who are now faced with their own battle to heal. You don't bounce back from a thing like this, not quickly anyway.

This has been a strange time for the LUC and I. The following is an email I sent them on Teusday.

>I wanted to add to Claire's thoughts. Monday was a very odd day for
>us. To see Owen in such a state and realize just how great the
>difficulties of being a parent can be was very sobering. I had thought
>that to go from that to the first shadowy glimpse of our child-to-be
>would be hard.
>

> But it wasn't. In fact what I took away from our time with you,
>Charlotte and Owen was entirely positive. It was a realization that
>love begets strength even in the face of such terrible difficulties.
> I'm sure you've had your black moments, moments when you felt
> you couldn't continue, couldn't make one more hard decision.
> And yet the people I saw on Monday were making those decisions
> and contemplating more with a grace and a strength that I
>couldn't imagine having. Couldn't imagine that is until I looked at
>that tiny figure on the ultrasound monitor.
>
> Daryl and Charlotte, by allowing me to share in this difficult time, however
> briefly, you have shown me a glimpse of what it means to truly love a child.
>No matter what happens in the end, your ordeal will have had at least
>that one positive effect in the world, an effect for which I'll be forever
>grateful.

Yes you read that right, I'm about to be a father.* This isn't the way I wanted to announce this but you can see how Owens illness and death and my impending fatherhood are all mixed up in my feelings. Daryl and Charlotte were two of the first people we told about our engagement and about the pregnancy. (Sorry Mum.) Mostly because it was a good way to distract them from their worries.

So now we all go on. Daryl and Charlotte to their grieving and healing and the LUC and I to our wedding and baby prep. I hope that our happiness will help them just as the example they gave me of good parenting will help me. I am going to hold what I learned very close as I take this journey into the deep, dark, mysterious jungle of fatherhood.


*Yes, yes I have details. As of today we're 14 weeks and 1 day in. The ultrasound and blood work showed normal development and reduced the likelihood of having a Downs Syndrome child from 1 in 686 to 1 in 6000 or so. The tyke was 7.5 cm long. We don't know the sex yet and aren't going to find out, kinda seems like cheating. Yes the marriage proposal took place before the conception. We really didn't expect to conceive on the first try (I'm trying very hard not to feel too manly about that). The wedding going to be 2 weeks before the due date. I hope our child is like us in that he or she is never on time for anything. There's a wedding web page in the works for updates, I'll post the link as soon as it's up and running. And finally remember: wedding gifts and baby gifts are two different things.