Newborns are magic.
Yes, I’ve been talking about parenthood less than I’ve wanted to because I am merely mortal and sometimes fall prey to societal pressures, such as the one that says not to talk about being a mom too much or else you risk making your entire personality about being a mom.
Well I don’t give a fuck anymore. What are people supposed to talk about and learn from if not the current moment and their ongoing firsthand experience? My current moment is a pocket of the day when my newborn is asleep, I’ve pumped my tits in the last hour, and I’m stealing a chunk of time to sit on the couch with my husband and hit the pen and just do nothing. My ongoing firsthand experience is that of parenting a newborn. It is magic. It is terror. And I want to talk about it. I don’t care if it’s all I talk about. It’s what’s happening.
Newborns are magic because they transform. What is magic if not transformation? I’ve always known that chemistry is magic because of the chemical reactions that cannot be undone. Newborns transform themselves hourly, they transform those who care for them, they transform the spaces around them. All while weighing less than ten pounds.
Newborn magic is when I hold my son for the first time and feel like I’ve just taken 5 hits of MDMA. It was truly… engulfing. The kind of euphoria that so many have attempted to replicate — and some have gotten very close. “This is better than drugs,” my husband and I kept saying to each other during those early days in the NICU. We said it in wonderment and shock, because prior to having this kid, nothing felt better than drugs. Nothing was supposed to feel better than drugs; we were only ever meant to seek experiences to match what drugs feel like, not to surpass it.
When I think about it, birthing and then having a newborn in my care has looked a lot like what my life looks like when I’m doing MDMA regularly: my sleep schedule is royally fucked, feeding myself is an uphill battle, routine is all but nonexistent, I always need to shower because I’m always sweating, my surroundings are a mess, and I feel fucking incredible. My body is creaking and yawning and begging for relief, but it also feels incredibly light and flooded with the warm sweetness I’ve come to associate with oxytocin. I really don’t know what meaning to make of these parallels yet. The only difference is that with a newborn, there’s no post-drug crash. The ride just keeps going and you stay on it.
Newborns are magic because they transform. Sometimes, my son wakes up from a nap and I can literally see that he’s grown. His face has shifted in some way. His hands are bigger. His eyes are a different color. They’re simultaneously *so fucking small* and also *so fucking big* every day. All you can do is watch in awe, completely powerless to stop this process. And you don’t want to stop it, even if it hurts your heart sometimes. Babies make the present moment even more NOW, if that makes any sense. You don’t want to look away because when you do, they change. They are truly only what they are in the present moment. Then the present moment becomes the next moment, and they’ve moved on. I don’t have any other word for that kind of power, except to call it magic.
Newborns transform those who care for them. Besides the obvious, like stealing sleep and phantom cries in the shower and nipples that are absolutely destroyed, they transform what the world means for their parents. In the weeks leading up to my son’s birth, I kept thinking to myself, “I can’t wait for everything else to stop mattering.” So many things seemed to matter so much, or demand my attention, and while I knew intellectually that these things were trivial, they still captivated my attention because I wasn’t giving my attention anywhere more worthy to go. I knew as soon as that kid left my body, so much of the noise would fall silent. And it did. Sometimes the silence is deafening (and so are the cries that pierce it), but it’s what I wanted. So many things don’t matter to me anymore. I even quit Twitter!
Newborns are magic and terror and while sometimes it can be demeaning to submit 24/7 to the needs of a tiny, screaming version of yourself, it’s not lost on me that I made that magic and that terror. Magic and terror exist within me. I am powerful and generative as fuck. Even if I made the fatal mistake of making my entire personality about being a mom, it would be a personality about being powerful. And I am okay with letting people see my power now.
