she reads!

These days I find myself thinking back to pre-child years and all the time I wasted when I could have been reading, books upon books of useful and useless literary, historical, you-name-it knowledge. I wish I had some of that time back. However, if I had it, I'd probably still squander it terribly because that's just how it goes, right? According to Murphy's Law or something? In the past few weeks, though, I've managed to carve out a little time to pick up a few short reads, one of which is Louise Erdrich's book The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year.

I wish I would have known about it when I was pregnant or while SD and I were in the throes of the first few months of parenthood. Nevertheless, it still fills me with supreme appreciation for being lucky enough to have the experience of being a parent and echoes many sentiments I have felt as I reflect on our first child's first year. It's beautifully written, and I would recommend it to any parent, especially new mothers. I'm not all the way through, but here's one of my favorite passages so far:

"We live and work with a divided consciousness. It is a beautiful enough shock to fall in love with another adult, to feel the possibility of unbearable sorrow at the loss of that other, essential, personality, expressed just so, that particular touch. But love of an infant is of a different order. It is twinned love, all absorbing, a blur of boundaries and messages. It is uncomfortably close to self-erasure, and in the face of it one's fat ambitions, desperations, private icons, and urges fall away into a dreamlike before that haunts and forces itself into the present with tough persistence. The self will not be forced under, nor will the baby's needs gracefully retreat. The world tips away when we look into our children's faces. The days flood by. Time with children runs through our fingers like water as we lift our hands, try to hold, to capture, to fix moments in a lens, a magic circle of images or words. We snap photos, videotape, memorialize while we experience a fast-forward in which there is no replay of even a single moment."

So true.