Recompile

I suppose it started right after Heather was born. I was drunk with the physical reality of motherhood. My body had been transformed; mind and spirit had to change, too, to keep up.

We were driving east up 67th toward Phinney, and I saw a man walking in the sidewalk. He was just a man. Some guy walking down the street. He wore an army green coat with faded jeans, hands deep in his pockets to keep out the January drafts. Worn out ankle high hiking boots in an indescribable shade of drab. His shaved bald head had a thin coating of now grey hair.

That bald head in the cold looked so much like my new baby’s. For a split second I saw him as his mother just have, just a few weeks after his birth. I wondered how that giant adult body held up a weak, newborn’s heavy head. Then he took another step and he was a middle aged man again.

For the rest of the day I was lost in that immediacy of motherhood. Everyone I saw was someone’s newborn.

I never quite recovered.

How do you get angry with someone, even someone who desperately deserves it, when in the blink of an eye you can see them as a two week old baby, utterly dependent on others for survival?

And aren’t we all?

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