A Startling Beauty

Some people are baby people. They start cooing while passing the infant apparel section. They volunteer to babysit at the first whiff of human growth hormone. They confidently inform new parents of the universal joys and tribulations ahead.

I am not a baby person. Other people’s babies are . . . fine. I don’t need to hold them. I don’t care how much they weighed at birth.

I did, however, just have a baby, after trying with my husband much harder and longer than even I expected. I couldn’t say why I wanted “a baby” enough to buy a fluoride filter, take my temperature every morning for seven years.

Our son, Zooey, is seven weeks old at the time I’m writing this. Now that he’s here (“earthside”, as they say, as if he hadn’t been in my body the whole time), there’s no reconciling my feelings with the baby people’s generic expressions of love. I find something impersonal in their comparisons of Zooey to a little prince, a little angel. I feel a flattening of my own experience in their gushing reveries over the smell of babies’ heads. As if babies’ heads were interchangeable. And yet, what do I expect them to say? Even I can’t describe Zooey, or my love for him, in language precise enough to satisfy me.

But let me try.

I love Zooey when he suckles. In German, there is a word for civilized eating, isst, and for the joyful, furious rooting of an animal, frisst. Zooey frisst.

I love Zooey’s supreme dignity. Is it animal, or alien? Whichever, it’s entirely unselfconscious, a mode of being that makes adults look like shame-stricken dunces sitting in the corner.

I love Zooey’s tropism toward light — the windows, the lamps — both still, equally, portals into other dimensions. He veers at them with the same look of expectation, demanding … something. And I chide myself for the way I have learned to look out at the world expecting nothing.

I love Zooey’s dramatic interludes. He flings his head away from my breast, one hand snaps up to his brow, and he tucks the back of his other hand under his chin, closing his eyes and flicking out his fingers in dismissive ecstasy: a venerable mime; a Shakespearean fool, brimming with bathos; a smug little seal.

I love Zooey staring, mesmerized, at the contrasting line between the wall and the ceiling, reminding me that I too can choose to see everything new, to recognize myself in the world’s startling, specific beauty.

Not the beauty of “babies,” or the beauty of some ideal of motherhood, but the beauty of Zooey’s face.

Before he was born, I was told to prepare for something purple and misshapen, screaming, covered in gore. How did I know that my husband and I were waiting for someone, calm and pristine as I lifted him out of the water? We instantly recognized each other.