Welcome to the World, Baby!

Welcome to the World, Baby!

Last week was an unusual week of new beginnings:

• My youngest son had a birthday, and we flew out of state to hang with him for a few days and hang with him. We intentionally scheduled our visit for three weeks prior to our grandson’s due date. As usual, I recalled all the details of his birth, his rushed and adorable childhood, and the agony of living a thousand miles away from him as an adult.
• My first picture book  dropped earlier-than-expected on Amazon in softcover and hardcover. A new book is in every way a baby that’s been birthed painfully and beautifully into the world. And ironically, it’s about babies who grow up and mothers who love them.
• Our grandson (our second grandchild) decided to enter the world early while we were gone. Although I was thrilled to be on my trip, I ached to get home to meet him. He is gorgeous. When I hold him, I feel all the parent and grandparent feelings in concert.
• My oldest son became a father.  Again, there are no words to fully describe this sensation.

The deja vu is overwhelming.

I am swimming in it, diving into the memories and paddling back up to the surface.

My son is holding a baby that looks exactly like he did, and his dad and I are behaving like grandparents.  Where did the years go?

My book is breath-taking and nostalgic and inspiring, and I love it so much. It’s my sixth book, but it’s my first picture book. I wrote it after my first grandchild was born, when my memory vault lay wide open, and all my mom emotions were flooding over me, mixing with new grandma emotions. The story is the culmination of all the mom-and-baby moments that are forever lodged in my prefrontal cortex. I’ve read it five or six times to my granddaughter already, and she loves it.

Do you know how the memory part of a mom brain works?

We do not have an organized filing system or a hard drive with life files sorted by content and corresponding emotions. The files are there, but they don’t open at assigned times or places. They are open all the time, like the screen on my computer, constantly being accessed and reviewed. Sometimes revised. Often reinterpreted. They are available for joy, grief, information, pain, and thankfulness at any moment and usually simultaneously.

Our mother memories–to use another metaphor–resemble a dam that’s been carefully built and maintained to stop an enormous river which systematically creates energy and efficiency through the control process.  But at any moment, the dam could spring a leak or break wide open. Fissures to mom memories always happen during predictable moments, like graduations, weddings, and childbirth. But more frequently, they occur as deja vu. Everything is deja vu. Sometimes I feel omniscient.

I’m present in a particular time and place while being present in another, older time and place. I see all the connection points, the story arc, the wisdom and the folly.

Deja vu looks like this:

You’re standing in a tidy foyer, seeing backpacks and shoes splayed across the floor that aren’t actually there.

You’re holding your grandbaby, but you feel 20-something again, a skinny girl with barely a belly bump, overwhelmed and emotional and so very proud that somehow you brought this tiny life into the world. You’re also surprised the hospital let you take this person home with you, when no evidence exists that you can keep it alive. At the same time, you know you’re old.

You’re surrounded by adult children talking about their jobs and their kids; instead seeing of accomplished adults, you see little boys giggling, pushing, and running. You see people you will never see again, and yet they’re right in front of you.

A week of new births is exhilarating.

You’re emotionally tired, like you’re running a race that you’re winning but you don’t want to finish.

Births are blessings, constant reminders that God is doing something new and unexpected.

Creation always glorifies its Creator.

Babies look like their parents, but they also look like the whole human race and their own individual selves. Every parent knows that a beautiful new baby changes daily. That’s mostly what parents and grandparents talk about: what the kids are doing now, what they’re learning, how much they’re growing. Change is an imperative aspect of creation.

Change makes everyone nostalgic.  Worried, expectant, joyful, sorrowful.

Moms. Dads. Grandparents. Authors. All of us, probably.

So I will savor all these new memories right now, in every way that I can. I am reading my book to my grandchildren. I am holding them while they sleep. I am watching my sons be men. I am filing away these memories in my brain for instant retrieval whenever deja vu strikes again.

Most likely, deja vu will happen later today.

I’m going to suggest that the point of remembrance is gratefulness.

That’s how I see memories today.