An Oct 9 B-day

Dear diary,

My brother’s wife gave birth to their son yesterday. This is the first child to be born to any of my siblings; so now our mom’s officially a grandmother. The baby was predicted to arrive near the end of the month, so everyone was surprised by the early delivery. I got a text message from my mother at 8:30 last night:

Hey Bryan, I am crying too much to call. Paul just brought Colleen to the hospital because her water broke. They will need to induce labor because she hadn’t begun to dilate. Paul will call with news.

Now, I just told you in my first paragraph here that their baby is healthy and that the new parents are both doing fine; so this text message probably doesn’t scare you as much as it scared me. But remember: I wasn’t expecting news about the delivery until the end of this month, and the detail about my mom “crying too much to call” made me think the worst. Every minute passed like an eternity, and I could think of nothing but tragic possible outcomes (imagining the worst is sort of my forte): I feared that the baby would be stillborn, or that it’d have horrendous defects, or that it’d need to live in an incubator forever – like a smoker’s iron lung (“a rigid case fitted over a patient’s body which administers artificial respiration by means of mechanical pumps”)…

And mom didn’t get back to me for the rest of the evening, so I began to entertain worst-case scenarios in my mind. I went to sleep with my phone at my side, expecting to be awakened at any moment with the saddest news: the baby’s dead; the mother’s dead; and your brother is suicidal: he’s up on a ledge in Winnipeg, threatening to jump; you’ll have to talk him down. And I don’t have any compelling reasons to remain alive, to keep on keeping on, to tough it out, to power thru—this world is not my kingdom—so I’d most likely fail at persuading Paul to give life another shot: I’d probably shrug and go up there on the ledge alongside him and say, “You have an interesting approach to the problem of dissatisfaction. Mind if I join you?” So my sleep was fitful, which admittedly is normal for me, but, just to spice up the story, let’s say that this left me all shook up.

So no call from mom all night. No news of baby.

So my sweetheart and I went out for a walk in the rain, after breakfast. We went to the park that has a pavilion made of stone situated in the midst of the dark green forest. And I read aloud from Blake’s Four Zoas. The natural reverb in this pavillion makes one’s voice resound like a prophet in an ancient temple; that’s why I like reading there. So we read for a while, and then returned home for lunch. Just before lunch, my mom finally called with news: “Paul and Colleen are at the hospital, waiting to be transferred to their new room. I shall go see them in about half an hour; do you want me to pick you up?” And I answered, “What’s happening; is everyone OK?” And my mom said, “Oh, yes, the baby was born this morning, and it’s healthy, and Colleen is fine; they’re just waiting to be transferred to the room where they can have visitors. I tried to text you last night, but I think it didn’t go thru.”

So I told my mom that we would meet her at the hospital. So we went there, and the baby was reclining on the bed next to his mother, and my brother the new father was standing beside them. Apparently the labor went fine; she only pushed for one hour.

The Hebrew women are not as the Egyptian women; for they are lively, and are delivered ere the midwives come in unto them. (Exodus 1:19)

So there was the baby with its parents. As soon as we entered the room, my mother grabbed hold of that newborn and didn’t let go for the entire two hours that we stayed. Even when Colleen’s own mother arrived, my mom just sat there rocking the child compulsively. And my sister read some gossip about astrological signs from her phone screen.

Then I asked, “Does the child have a name?”

And the parents said, “Not yet.”

Then my sweetheart said, “Last night I had a dream where all the babies in the world were named Frank Booth.”

And I said, “All the babies in the world ARE named Frank Booth—that’s true—but people just give them different names after they’re born, because we live one great big lie.”

Then the nurse came in and said she had some checkup questions and procedures to do, and she asked Colleen if she’d rather have her visitors step out of the room for a moment (a strong hint that we should all step out of the room for a moment) – but my mother grit her teeth like a dog does when the hospital personnel try to steal her bone; so I said to my mom: “Dear mom, we’ve been here for two hours now. We only planned to stay thirty minutes. We should go.” So mom reluctantly gave up the baby to its rightful owner, and we coaxed her slowly out of the room: two steps forward, one step back.

That’s it. That’s all I remember from our first encounter with the Untitled Life Form produced by my brother and his wife. I feel that I’m not very good at writing entries like this, about things that normal people care about; because I don’t understand the appeal of newborn babies; I only care about kids once they’ve developed their own personality. Teenagers and above: those are my people. I love children the moment their parents begin to hate them. Because all parents love their child when it’s a tiny helpless thing, and then the moment it matures into a real human, at around the age of twelve, the parents realize that this once-cute thing that they created now represents a strange new future, and this scares the heck out of them. But I love the potential for change: I welcome the future. The stranger the better. I’m a fan of poetry, which is as future as it gets.

But the worst is when a kid grows up to be the type of person that the parents easily love. Like when the father loves baseball and the son also loves baseball, so the father and son have a good relationship, centered on their mutual love of baseball. That makes me sick. Or if the mother loves church, and her child says “I wanna dedicate my life to the church, and be a priest who abuses other children.” This type of conspiracy between guardians and offspring to further the ugliness of our world is what I’m dead-set against.

Happy families neither know nor care that their country is engaging in wars of aggression. Happy families sleep soundly thru all this: they’re one dull team-unit of selfishness; they couldn’t care less about the tragedies of others. As long as the sausage is cheap, they don’t care how it’s made.