One of the weirdest and most unexpected things about the pregnancy so far has been the waxing and waning of the feeling that it's actually real and happening. My wife and I were chatting about this yesterday. Last week when we found out the baby's sex, we didn't know what hit us. Suddenly this little blobby image we kept seeing felt like it was going to be a flesh-and-blood person in our lives. It felt so real, and we knew that every kick and movement for a few days after that was coming directly our little son.
Oddly, though, as we were driving back from a road trip to Kingston yesterday, we were both amazed at how the pregnancy had somehow switched back to feeling unreal again. What I mean is that we know that in theory we're going to have a baby, but nothing in the day to day suggests it's anything more than a kind of vague notion.
I don't know why the mind does this, but I have a feeling it has something to do with how long we can sustain our imaginations for. When we get a new, vital piece of information, it's easy to hang every impression on it, and organize our thoughts around the key detail, but it's hard to keep the memory fresh. It's a bit like listening to your new favourite song over and over until it stops having an impact. I wonder what other details in the pregnancy will stick like this. I wonder if it'll get harder to ignore once Lis gets to be truly huge. Will it still feel like the day-to-day, or is it going to take over everything?
For now, it's kind of nice to both remember and forget we're having a baby. I'd imagine there will be plenty of time in the coming months for us to wish that we could forget about having him, so this is a dreamily enjoyable phase. It's healthy to think about other things. I think it's overly romantic to believe that you will spend every minute of every day in awe of the miracle of birth. Those moments come in their time, and it's better, I believe, when they come as a surprise. The alternative seems to be some kind of persistent sentimentality, which doesn't really benefit anyone,
Oddly, though, as we were driving back from a road trip to Kingston yesterday, we were both amazed at how the pregnancy had somehow switched back to feeling unreal again. What I mean is that we know that in theory we're going to have a baby, but nothing in the day to day suggests it's anything more than a kind of vague notion.
I don't know why the mind does this, but I have a feeling it has something to do with how long we can sustain our imaginations for. When we get a new, vital piece of information, it's easy to hang every impression on it, and organize our thoughts around the key detail, but it's hard to keep the memory fresh. It's a bit like listening to your new favourite song over and over until it stops having an impact. I wonder what other details in the pregnancy will stick like this. I wonder if it'll get harder to ignore once Lis gets to be truly huge. Will it still feel like the day-to-day, or is it going to take over everything?
For now, it's kind of nice to both remember and forget we're having a baby. I'd imagine there will be plenty of time in the coming months for us to wish that we could forget about having him, so this is a dreamily enjoyable phase. It's healthy to think about other things. I think it's overly romantic to believe that you will spend every minute of every day in awe of the miracle of birth. Those moments come in their time, and it's better, I believe, when they come as a surprise. The alternative seems to be some kind of persistent sentimentality, which doesn't really benefit anyone,
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