Wonder
of the Firstborn
By
LAURIE LEE
She is, of course, just an ordinary miracle, but she is also the
particular late wonder of my life. This
girl, my child, this parcel of will and warmth, was born last autumn. I saw her first lying next to her mother,
purple and dented like a bruised plum.
Then the nurse lifted her up and she came suddenly alive, her bent legs
kicking crabwise. Her first living
gesture was a thin wrangling of the hands accompanied by a far-out Herbridean
lament.
This moment of meeting seemed to be a birth time for
both of her first, my second life and us.
Nothing, I knew, would be the same again, and I think I was reasonably
shaken. Then they handed her to me,
stiff and howling. I kissed her, and
she went still and quiet, and I was instantly enslaved by her flattery of my
powers.
Only a few weeks have passed since that day, but
already I’ve felt all the obvious astonishment. Newborn, of course she looked already a centenarian, exhausted, shrunken, bald, tottering on the brink of an old crone’s grave. But with each day of survival she has grown
younger and fatter, her face filling, drawing on life, every breath of real air
healing the birth-death stain she had worn so witheringly.
The rhythmic tides of her sleeping and feeding
spaciously measure the days and nights.
Her frail self-absorption is a commanding presence, her helplessness is
strong as a rock, so that I find myself event to her silences as though some
great engine were purring upstairs.
When awake, and not feeding, she sports and gobbles
dryly, like a ruminative jackdaw, or strains and groans and waves her hands
about as though casting invisible nets.
I see her hauling in life, groping fiercely with every limb and muscle,
working blind at a task no one can properly share, in darkness where she is
still alone. Each night I take her to bed like a book and lie close and study
her. Her dark-blue eyes stare straight
into mine, but off-center, not seeing me.
Already, I suppose, I should be afraid for her future, but I am more
concerned with mine. I fear perhaps her
first acute recognition, her first questions, and the first man she makes of
me. But for the moment she stares idly
through me, at the pillow, at the light on the wall.
Meanwhile, as I study her, I find her early
strangeness insidiously claiming a family face. Here she is, brand-new, my daughter whom I must guard. A year ago this space was empty; not even a
hope for her was in it. Now she’s here
with our name upon her, and no one will call in the night to reclaim her. She will grow, learn to run in the garden,
run back and call this home. Or will
she?
All those quick lively tendrils seem so vulnerable
to their own recklessness—surely she’ll fall on the fire or roll down some
crevice or kick herself out of the window?
I look at those weaving hands and complicated ears, the fit of the skin
around that delicate body, and I realize I’m succumbing to the new-parenthood
shakes. My daughter is so new to me
still that I can’t yet leave her alone; I have to keep digging her out of her
sleep to make sure that she’s really alive.
Her face is a sheaf of masks, which she shuffles
through aimlessly. I watch eerie
rehearsals of those emotions she will one day need, random, out-of-sequence,
but already exact, automatic, yet strangely knowing: a quick pucker of fury, a
puff of ho-hum boredom, a beaming after-dinner smile, perplexity, slyness, a
sudden wrinkling of grief, pop-eyed interest, fat-lipped love. Ever since I was handed this living heap of
expectations, I can feel nothing but simple awe.
What have I got exactly? And what am I going to do with her? And what for that matter will she do with me?
I have got a daughter, whose life is already
separate from mine, whose will already follows its own directions, and who has
quickly corrected my woolly preconceptions of her by being herself. I am merely the keeper of her temporary
helplessness. With luck, she can alter
me; indeed, is doing so now. She will
give me more than she gets, and may even later become my keeper.
But if I could teach her anything at all, by
unloading upon her some of the ill-tied parcels of my years, I’d like it to be
acceptance and a holy relish for life.
To accept with gladness the fact of being a woman—when she’ll find all
nature to be on her side. If pretty, to
thank God and enjoy her luck. To be
willing to give pleasure without feelings loss of face, to prefer charm to the
vanity of aggression, and not to deliver her powers and mysteries into the
opposite camp by wishing to compete with men.
In this way, I believe—though some of her sisters
disapprove—she might know some happiness and also spread some around.
And, as a brief tenant of this precious and
irreplaceable world I’d ask her to preserve life both in herself and
others. To prefer always Societies for
the Propagation and Promotion of rather than those for the Abolition or
Prevention of.
I’d ask her never to persecute others for the sins
hidden in herself, nor to seek justice in terms of vengeance; to avoid like a
plague all acts of mob righteousness and to accept her frustrations and faults
as her own personal burden, and not to blame them too often, if she can
possibly help it, or young or old, whites of blacks, East, West, Jews,
Gentiles, television or bingo.
For the rest, may she be my own salvation, for any
man’s child is his second chance. In
this role I see her leading me back to my beginnings, reopening rooms I’d
locked and forgotten, and stirring the dust in my mind by re-asking the big
questions—as any child can do. With my
tardy but bright-eyed pathfinder I shall return to that wood which long ago I
fled from but which together we may now enter and know.
