Olaia has been growing with us for the past 11 months now. For the
first 9, she was an abstraction, something we were anticipating but had
no idea what to really expect. How would she change our lives? What
would she be like? I’ve been doing some video editing of her to send to
our families and after watching her (both in person and on film) over
and over, I find that I have some strange feelings, feelings that I
didn’t expect and maybe don’t quite understand yet. I look at her
there. In one scene she’s in her bouncer seat, (thanks Leila) and I
feel like it’s the first object in her life that she can interact with,
as in touch, and manipulate. I watch her struggling with the little
spinners and gadgets that make up the play bar in front of her. She now
reaches out and hits what she’s looking at. Sometimes she’s not
successful, but she’s getting better. Today, however, she got her hand
caught under the bar and rather than put her arm down and withdraw it,
she tried to raise it against the bar. Obviously she felt that this
thing had stolen her hand and that she was stuck. Daddy was right there
and as she started to cry for help, he was there to gently pull her
away from the entrapping device. Ahh, I don’t know what I would have
done without you, daddy.
It was then that I had this overwhelming sense of, I don’t know
quite how to say it, protection? of needing to help her, of wanting
something. I can’t explain it. There she was this little girl, so
helpless, so dependent on her parents, trying to reach out and really
trying, but having trouble. There was this melancholy, this regret that
she would suffer failure at some time in her life. She’s going to have
hard days ahead and even though daddy will be around (I hope so
anyway), I can’t help but feel worry, angst, and well, my heart just
goes out to her. I watch her on her tummy trying to lift her head, she
does it for a few minutes but after that she gets tired and ends up
face down on the mattress. Poor thing. She does so well, but then she
can’t, and she kind of panics (because she can’t figure out why she
can’t lift her head and why she’s face down), and daddy helps her out.
Ahhh, much better. She just has such an earnest look on her face, like
she’s really really trying and just can’t do it. I don’t know why, but
it breaks my heart.
I wonder if we ever figure out how to succeed here in this life.
Life is just one big confusing trial after another. There’s childhood
where everything is so new and you’re so dependent. There’s adolescence
where suddenly when you thought you were getting the hang of things,
the rules change. You turn 18, graduate from high school thinking you
know everything, and bam, college is another blow to your mastery of
the universe. You follow on, conquering challenges (because your
parents taught you well), and again you find yourself graduating and
being as lost as you were as a newborn. What do I do with the rest of
my life? Have I made right choices? Why are these things such surprises
to us and why do we place our hopes in our experiences that flee us at
such regular intervals?
There are lots of places where we trip and wish there were someone
who knew it all to help us out. What’s the big picture? Do we spend all
our lives gathering consciousness only to in the end fall short of
complete awareness. At seventy we still get our hands stuck under
symbolic bars and instead of having awareness of what to do, we yank
and pull and scream and cry, not getting it and not really having
learned the smallest lessons, the ones that release us from a prison
where we are just children crying out for our daddies, so helpless and
alone.
I have to say that all these things go through my head as I watch
Olaia struggle with awareness and I am reminded our own struggles. They
are no different and she is just at the beginning of a long and
complicated road. I wish I could take it all away just make it all
simple. I’ll do my best, but I know I can’t do it all, and I know that
some day she’s going to have to figure out that bar herself.
Now, lest you think I’m being all melodramatic and fatalistic, I
know life is a wonderful gift, but I just can’t help but wish we could
transcend our human frailties, our inability to "get" certain things.
There are math problems that just perplex me and that bugs me. I can
feel sometimes the limits of my brain, the places were my consciousness
fails to penetrate. I know where they are and that bugs me. There are
certain things that I just don’t get. Certainly we all have our blind
spots, but wouldn’t it be nice to find a way just clean them out and
illuminate and move beyond our sticking points?
I just love that little girl so much it would be a wonderful gift
indeed to bestow upon her a calming awareness that it’ll turn out all
right, a peaceful mastery of her surroundings, and a tranquillity that
will never allow her to be caught below another bar.