Bringing home a new baby is disconcerting in more ways than one. There's all the traditional stuff; the newness, the lack of sleep, the screaming...But there's also the abstract strangeness of it all. You sit on the couch and rest your tiny newborn on your belly. The baby curls up instinctively. After all she's spent nine months curled up, why stop now?
You rest your hands on her back and you feel content, at peace, and as you gaze down lovingly you realize that you're both in the position you used to adopt when she was still in utero.This little baby used to be inside you. It's the same child, the same size, the same position, the only difference is that she used to be inside and now she is outside. That and the small fact that when she was inside she was an abstract.
You carry your child for nine months, and you get to see her on a grainy, fuzzy screen. They send you home with snapshots that you put on your fridge door, but you can't really imagine, or rather picture, what's inside. You feel a bump, a foot, an elbow, a butt. Something is moving, it's alive, but in your mind it's not a baby, your baby.
It's hard to explain to someone who hasn't been pregnant, but for those nine months that baby is a mere extension of you and, try as you might, visualizing it is near impossible. One night the baby is dark haired and chunky. Another night it has blue eyes and long arms. But you don't know, can't know; it's all speculation. Those babies aren't real, they're just figments of your imagination created by a brain trying hard to make the abstract tangible.
While you are pregnant you know you're going to have a baby, but it's just an abstract notion until you hear it cry for the first time. When she opens her cute little mouth and lets out that first wail everything changes. Right then, in that split instant, all the imagined, possible babies rush together and collide becoming this one perfect, very real baby. And try as you might it's virtually impossible to reconcile the realness of this live child with the abstractness of the bumps and lumps you felt within.
You sit on the couch and you hold your curled up infant and you think "she was inside me just a few days ago. She was curled up like this. This is the foot that kept pushing against my rib. This is the hand that poked my bladder." But your brain balks when it comes to actually picturing this very real, very tangible child inside your belly.
Later as your baby grows and loses that tendency to curl up into a fetal ball it becomes even harder to reconcile the two and as much as you love your squealing, giggling baby a tiny part of you mourns those virtual babies that you spent countless hours loving.
