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13. Summer's end

Soleia 1.85 The sun rose at 645 today.   You hadn’t slept long enough.   You had been set to bed late the night before.   We went to have breakfast and give Mama the morning to herself before she had to depart. You dipped behind the clouds on the way home, dimming the daylight.   Like I said, you hadn’t slept enough and this time you would hide your light all the way to noon. The ride to Nana and Grandpa’s was uneventful.   You ate Multi-grain Cheerios the whole way, making eyes at passengers and at your father for the entire journey. You were dimming again as Grandpa picked us up from the RT station at McCowan.   It wouldn’t be long before you’d need another nap and I readied myself to the task of finding a relatively quiet room in the house were you might go under. But once we settled into Nana and Grandpa’s bed in the darkened room, I could here the weezing and gasping that you made from beneath your pacifier on the bed beside me.   You couldn’t breath – your nos
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11. The photosphere

Soleia 0.147 You've gone through phases.  Like seasons in miniature.  Babies lose weight after they're born - the transition off of intervenous nutrition from your mother is sometimes tenuous.  It isn't hard to imagine why: the foreign nature of coordinating the needs of a new little crying leech with the uneven and novel production of milk in your mother's breasts...Mama tried her best.  She really wanted it.  She wanted to love it, the process of nursing you and feeding you from her body as she had when you were inside of her.  But there was too much anxiety, too much uncertainty.  Too much work and too much coordinating when the outcome was unsure.  You had needs that her body couldn't provide - even when it could sometimes the fit between the two of you wasn't good.  There were too many moving parts at a time when we were desperately looking for the least troublesome way to make sure you were doing the one thing you had to do: grow. Mama decided that we

10. You, before you knew

Soleia 0.113 It is important that you don't think I write this just to sound clever or caring.  This isn't the show...the spectacle of loving you.  I really more than anything want to give you an accounting of who you were before you could remember who you were - Soleia, before Soleia knew what a 'Soleia' was. So much of what we are and what we think we are, is what is told to us about ourselves by others.  It creates this outline that we fill in with our actions and behaviours, our reactions, our fears, our hopes and our dreams.  But the outline is sometimes so restrictive that it keeps us from filling out things that others simply don't see. There is this tension between freedom and structure that exists in the universe.  When I tell you something about yourself am I imposing my understanding upon you, limiting your freedom to be what you choose?  Or am I simply informing you of something that is actually there, giving you a structure and framework with whic

9. Tears for the Sun

Soleia 0.106 I hope that you never think me heartless.  I can see how your mother is with you and I know what I must be to you.  She will be soft so I must be hard.  I must be hard so that you can be both. In your life, you will meet people and mostly be able to safely and quickly dismiss them as one or the other.  Wishy-washy people who go back on their word, dream without taking action, and consider an insult equivalent to a violation.  Boring, anal, impatient people set in their ways, conflating rudeness for confidence, volume for persuasion and proud of their pig-headedness, their stubborness, their ignorance. Learn from these people, Kwynn.  Learn from their faults.  Learn what not to do and how not to be yourself. Even in moments of solidity, liquids can form.  I like to think of myself as ice: cold and rational with respect to what must be done for you.  I've been ice since you were born - winter ice, the ice that doesn't melt even when beaten upon by the Sun.  I

8. Special relativity

Soleia 0.76 "By a process of contradiction, distance in space makes things look small, and therefore free from defect. This is why a landscape looks so much better in a contracting mirror or in a camera obscura, than it is in reality. The same effect is produced by distance in time. The scenes and events of long ago, and the persons who took part in them, wear a charming aspect to the eye of memory, which sees only the outlines and takes no note of disagreeable details. The present enjoys no such advantage, and so it always seems defective. And again, as regards space, small objects close to us look big, and if they are very close, we may be able to see nothing else, but when we go a little way off, they become minute and invisible. It is the same again as regards time. The little incidents and accidents of every day fill us with emotion, anxiety, annoyance, passion, as long as they are close to us, when they appear so big, so important, so serious; but as soon as they are bo

7. General relativity

Soleia 0.61 It's this idea of supermassiveness.  You may not be very big in physical terms but in psychological and spirtual terms, you are the biggest thing in the universe.  Your life is this supermassive event, this supermassive object around which our lives now revolve.  With that supermassiveness comes the way that you warp the world around you, the dramatic pull that you have on those you meet.  You could call it your 'gravitational pull' - the way people are drawn to your sounds, your smiles, your little face. But as Einstein revealed, this gravitational pull and the way that you change our reality has tangible effects on both space and time.   Just taking a look around our little region of the house and your effects on our space is apparent: the room that we've made for you both in our hearts and in our environment.  A cradle, a crib.  Swings, playmats.  Bumble chairs, carseats, strollers, carriers, baby bathtubs, bottles.  Sound machines, monitors.  All thi

6. One moon (or Five angels)

Soleia 0.31 We are exhausted.  You won't sleep in a crib.  That would be too easy.  If you aren't in someone's arms, you won't go under.  If you are leaving someone's arms,  you won't stay under. We went for a walk and it didn't seem to be improving our moods. We were coming home, resolved to the fact that there would be no happy ending to this little journey.  It was there, just a little ways from the house that we saw two women coming in our direction, both of them pushing strollers. Two Afro-Canadian women, women far younger than us.  In the strollers were two beautiful little girls, friends no doubt by virtue of the friendship between these two young mothers.   They asked us how we were and your mother was as she always was: honest, to a fault.  She spoke candidly about our travails and was rejuvenated by the cameraderie; the shared struggle.  The mothers told us of things that we'd seen, things that we'd seen and misunderstood, th