The Sun

Astonishing layers of love in utter normalcy: becoming a non-birth parent

Photo by Nick Jio on Unsplash

The day my son was born I desperately wanted to feel the sun on my skin. A singular obsessive thought invaded my mind around 3:30 pm as the sun was getting lower in the mountain range outside the hospital window. Yes, the same sun rises and sets each day, but the exact beam of sunlight that touches down today will never return. I wanted the sunlight of this day on my face. While my wife was resting and my newborn son (for purposes of this series I’ll call “Bear”) was sleeping soundly, I went outside for a walk. I walked toward the golden fields and mountain range in the far distance. It was cold but the light felt fantastic. Still awake from the previous day I wanted to conjure deep thoughts and profound feelings but nothing emerged. Just a fuzzy buzzing of an alien phrase: my son. Two words that felt so detached from reality. What could this possibly have to do with me?

As I wandered toward a familiar graveyard—one I’d visited on walks in the neighborhood—I was not thinking of the cheap poetics of moving from a birth to a death. I thought, I should turn around, I felt a powerful magnetic pull, while my legs kept walking away. It occurred to me that I could walk for a very long time. That a baby, a child, a lifetime of care is a lot of work. What does son have to do with me? What would daughter have had to do with me either?

In the hours and days following the birth of Bear, my ambivalence shifted in surprising ways. When I held my son I wanted nothing more. I was stunned by the way I needed him—not a known love, or care, but a kind of fiending. When my wife was nursing him, bonding with him, holding him during his many deep hospital naps I was shocked by a feeling of jealousy. My envy made me bitter, vain, and silly. On a logical level, I knew she needed to bond, to feed, to be his primary anchor to this new and jarring experience of life, but I resented it in waves and said so in petty sideways comments. When I wasn’t holding him, another feeling swirled between the crests of envy: I felt detached from this being. Who’s kid is this? When are they coming to get it? Can we call it’s parents?

The other side of my ambivalence shot through with electric force when I held my son in my arms. Our skin was in communication, vibrating through one another. I’d take a breath in and he’d release it as a quivering coo. The muscles of my neck aching as I studied his face from the crook of my arm. He raised his blonde wispy eyebrows, eyes closed, tiny lips open as his forehead crinkled. I told him about birds, about wintertime, about the view from the hospital window he could not yet see. I wanted to tell him so much and I wanted to shut up and listen for his own birdy sounds.

It is an electric force of love that binds us: shocking and thrilling.

Photo by Jacek Smoter on Unsplash

A rainbow is an impossible thing to hold

When a light beam is shattered—when it is broken—it becomes a rainbow. In the Bardo, you shine getting closer and closer to this embodied existence. Your arrival is an explosion of sorts, violent and focused. Birth that breaks the light into a rainbow. A rainbow is an impossible thing to hold in one’s hand.

Qualities of a rainbow are meant to be felt and not explained. Often a surprise, a rainbow can feel utterly private when it’s projected across the sky, available to everyone, or a party when it’s scattered across the kitchen walls at sunrise from a decoration that sits on the windowsill while one sips a coffee in silence. A rainbow can not be owned. It is finicky and fleeting.

I imagine you moving from this light beam phase to the embodied phase, and in the translation, your whole being is scattered into rainbows across the room, across the mountain view from your bedroom, across the generations you’ll never meet.

Qualities of a rainbow are meant to be felt.
I must bear the inane desire to capture it with its innate impossibility.

You are stealing something from me: My independence? My creative force? My image of myself, the barfly who talks of doing great things? With you, so central, I can not pretend I’ll do great things. I must show up for the absurd monotony of catching a broken light beam.

Existential pontificating and Victorian Ghost Syndrome—in which I wander from room to room saying what will become of me?—are no longer the luxury maladies that invade my thinking. No time or energy for those, while I’m in charge of keeping this scattering of colors warm, dry, fed, embodied.

Will I ever get those parts of me back? Will you take them on, absorb some part of me that I’m no longer in possession of?

A rainbow is an impossible thing to hold in my hand; some part of you will never be contained by me. Just as I hope some part of me will never be contained.