To Love a Baby

I never loved a baby before. I always saw dirty faces, disgusting stained onesies . . .parents who showed way too many photos of their child, from every different angle possible. I couldn't really imagine changing diapers, cutting fingernails, suctioning boogers from their tiny noses or even just sticking a finger up there if possible. I truly never ever pictured myself singing lullabies or saying, "I'm mommy." I never would have thought that my husband and I would so quickly fall into calling each other daddy and mommy . . . and that it's kind of sexy.

To love a baby is like entering some type of Narnia and I must confess, it's happened to me. It's like a drug addiction and creeps on you with incredible doses of unexperienced ecstasy. Maybe that's what's so exciting, that at my age of 36 and a bit jaded, here is something so fresh, so unexpected, so uncontrollable, so humbling, so spontaneous and so filled with unconditional love.

I am now one of those who has a photo of my baby from every angle possible. I hold him for hours sometimes and just rock back and forth on the rocking chair as if we're lost at sea, smelling his baby skin, caressing his fine-haired soft head with the sides of my chin and cheeks and give him delicate kisses with almost every sway. The tenderness is immense and no other creature than your own baby can lure it from you so organically. My husband asks me, "do you think he knows how much me love him?" as he rubs Bruno's cheeks with his own and then gives him a big suction kiss.
"I don't believe you love me just because you tell me," I say. "Of course, he feels how much we love him."
"When will he start kissing?" My husband sounds as if he's in some type of desperation. This is what baby love does to you. You even feel pangs of love and joy when they fart in your arms. You rejoice together as parents every time they take a shit. "Is it a big one?" You scream to the other whose changing him. "Should we run a bath?"
It's insane. It's mad. Your life becomes secondary to this new relationship - to your new role - and you finally, finally, see your parents differently. Even if you "understood" them before, you now understand them differently . . .for better or for worse. Not every parent surrenders to the baby love. But when you do, it is one of life's greatest gifts of all. It didn't take me long to enter. And now I'll never turn back.