(This is Part II because I took such massive inspiration from the incredible Kate Baer’s poem, so we’ll call that a Part I.)
You will be, absolutely, an imperfect parent. That is the only kind there is. The thoroughest Google search will not negate this. Feel welcome to grieve this now and later, but don’t let it get caught like laces under your shoes. You still have places to go.
Here is the advice: birth is rebirth, if you let it be. Follow your baby’s lead, and you will awaken anew to the ordinary miracles: water, the color of nothing, pouring smoothly from the tap in preparation for a bath. Light darting, dancing between the high up leaves. Eyes waking up to the color green. A lifetime of milk, and then suddenly, explosively: banana. Daddy cradling the stiff box with strings, plucking a few with knowing fingers, and summoning the same sweet song night after night. Invigorate again your capacity for wonder.
Here’s the advice: you will mourn anew, too. The babies who are not comforted. The parents who go it alone. The children who go to bed with empty bellies. What God must there be to allow this? You will curse and spit at the cruelty of humanity, the cruelty of happenstance. Superlatives are insufficient to name the Scary and the Sad, or to acknowledge your own insufficiency while staring them down. Your heart now lives outside of your body, and the tremulous waves of vulnerability sweep in fast and deep.
So, ground your feet and decide: for every step within your purview, this baby will know love; will be enveloped and entangled, unable to take a step outside of it.
Remember, again! Over and over: the wonder. What God must there be, what ingenuity and whimsy, to dream up a daffodil waving at you in the breeze? Consider the blustering, body convulsing shock of a sneeze. Move your own fingers over the cable knit sweater, the grainy wood, the thousand flimsy blades of grass. Move your own fingers, with absolute focus and tenderness, over a loved one’s face. Bend your knees. Twirl your ankles in their sockets. Fling your arms out to their limits. How many things need to occur exactly correctly for you to do this? How many chemical interactions, up and down your spine like fireworks, must carry forward the shout of “Yes! Go!”
So go, Parent, though you forget the socks and though Google plunks down stifled answers. Look where your baby is looking, and marvel. Carry the grief of your ineptitude and the world’s great worries as a passenger, but do not allow it to drive. Consider this: you can love this child. You will love this child. Here is the advice: you have all you need. Open your heart wide, and begin.