So, it's officially the future. 2010. And our little girl is growing up.
In the last 3 or 4 weeks she's started talking (well, what we consider talking: uuhhhhs and arrrrgs in rapid succession, very closely resembling sentences), copying when we blow our lips, laughing and as of last night, rolling over and waving goodbye. How does this stuff happen so quick? She's so quickly becoming social, independent.
But she's also in the process of becoming her. So often we hear people say how amazing it is to realize that this little baby, once a part of mother, is entirely her own person. And these people say they realize this early on. I have a different impression altogether. It's always hard for me to express big ideas/concepts like this in words, but to me, she's slowing growing from being part of me, her mother, to being more fully her. It didn't happen spontaneously at the moment of birth. It's a continuous and fluid process. In the first weeks after her birth, I couldn't distinguish Noa from myself. In conversation I'd forget to refer to the "three of us"; instead it'd be "us two." There's something to that. I didn't forget about Noa. I really think it's because, since she left my body--no, since she was conceived--she has been slowly growing into herself as a new person.
Take this for instance: During pregnancy a mom will develop a darkly pigmented line going down from her bellybutton called a linea negra. It becomes darker as the pregnancy progresses, and, after birth, will begin to fade. Amazingly, baby gets one too, and the same thing happens. And now these lines we have, just like the memory-experience of the particularly deep and intimate connection we had when she was inside me, are slowing dissolving into the past. Of course we're growing towards and alongside each other on a different, more lasting plane, but in this most subtle and spiritual way she's letting me go.
Really, there's something intensely human about it. I guess it carries with it the idea that no one is solely him or herself, that families (and, further, humanity) are connected to an extent beyond what I'd ever considered before Noa. Over the course of our lives, she will never fully leave me, nor will I leave her.
