The First Best Day Of My Life, Thirty-Two Years Ago

Keep your attention in the here-and-now. Don't past-trip. Putting your attention in the past means that here-and-now is continuing on without you.
Stephen Gaskin.

Every morning I wake up dissatisfied and at least slightly despairing. It is my way. On the best days I shake these feelings off quickly and move on but some days they linger, as if they'd taken root in my bones, my heart, my blood.

Today seems to be one of those days.

I keep thinking about how thirty-two years ago today I was holding my first just-born baby in my arms.

I was twenty-one years old, barely a woman, and a just-born mother, so frighteningly full of love for the baby I was holding that the universe was hardly big enough to contain it and indeed, as I looked into that baby's eyes, held that baby's body to mine, my thoughts did race outward to the celestial.

I thought of stars in space as I looked into the infinite depths of my baby's eyes.

And today I think back on myself, holding that baby and I am still in wonder at the magnificent way our hearts have evolved to love another that much. I still think that it is somehow the force that holds this whole thing together- that sort of love. It is that powerful. It can bend light, it can cause gravity to loosen its hold, it can affect the spin of the planets in their orbits.

And yet here I am today, thirty-two years later, looking back, and my heart is heavy.

I am, as Stephen Gaskin says, past-tripping.

I think of that girl, that just-born mother and how her heart trembled on the verge of jumping out of her chest with the jolting joy of her baby's new life. I remember how she pressed her mouth to her baby's ear and made every sort of promise to that baby in a breathy whisper. The moon, the stars, a life filled with more sweetness and light than any human being's life has ever held.

And of course, I was not able to fulfill those promises. I was only human, tethered to earth with all its myriad complications, its rules of physics, its laws of gravity, perhaps loosened for a moment with the hugeness of my love, but which soon settled back into its normal unyielding demands, its heaviness of reality.

And my heart fills now, thinking of this.

Perhaps it is a strange form of bi-polar disorder, stretched out over the course of three decades. Or perhaps it is just the complete and utterly disorienting realization that thirty-two years have passed since that day and where am I? What am I doing?

Young hippie mother in love with her first baby to old hippie mother still in love with that baby, but weary now. So weary some days of the millions of minutes made up of the minutiae of my life.

The dishes need washing.
The laundry needs doing.
The dogs need feeding.
We're out of cereal, the pump is broken, the garden needs watering, the books need writing, the floors need sweeping, the heart needs mending, the spirit needs tending, the thousand tiny cuts need binding.

How did I get from that holy room, holding that holy child, my holy heart so full of light that I'm sure it registered in the mind of God to being so old and worn out?

It has happened so fast. At the speed of unbent light. No. Faster than that.

And I can't go back. I can't whisper warnings in that young mother's ear about this choice, or that. I can't tell her to trust herself more, to stand up for what she knew was right, to open her eyes to blinding truths, to be wary, to be stronger, to be aware that time, even as she held that baby, her milk not even come in yet, was flowing so fast that it would drown her if she let it.

I can't go back and change anything, nor would I. It doesn't work that way, nor should it. I would not interfere with that woman's hopes and dreams and innocence for anything in the world. That was a perfect moment, just as it was.

I am here. That baby is here. He is grown up. He is a man. He is someone I am prouder of than I could ever have imagined thirty-two years ago. His path has been a hard one but he has strong shoulders and strong legs and he is confident as he walks.

He taught me about love, that first second of his life.

He teaches me about strength, every second of his life.

He is here, he is now, he is perfect.

And if there are regrets in my heart about anything, anything at all, none of it has to do with him. Or with his sisters, either, except for this:
I wish, oh babies, I wish- I could have done better by you sometimes. I do.

I wish I could have done better by me sometimes, too.

But here we are.

And it's time to pull myself away from the past and get on with the here-and-now. It needs my attention. While I am here, I have to give it. That's the deal we make when we're born, when we give birth.

There is the holy light of love and there are the diapers that need changing.
There is the magnificent tsunami of joy and there are the endless nights of colic and weeping.
There is the perfect plan of life and there are the regrets.
They are all part of it, aren't they?

We continue on.

We celebrate.

Happy birthday, Son.
Thank-you for the lessons. Thank-you for being my here-and-now for all these years.

I still think of the stars when I think of you.

And my heart lightens and rises up and I go on.