Skip to main content

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 this stuff that wasn't here before you existed, here to make your stay comfortable and possible.  This space - the room that we've made for you in our lives.

And time...well that is much easier to describe, your effect on time.  The first thirty-seven years of my life seem so distant and unremarkable.  Time is totally in flux now that you are here: it dilates to fill endless nights of crying and soothing you, it compresses so that an hour of kisses and playing passes by in a matter of minutes.  Three minutes of you screaming is an eternity...the smallest smile of recognition on your face at my presence is the gift of a lifetime.  Two months have you existed now, warping our reality and I honestly can't say if it was the longest or shortest two months of my life.

All things are always relative, but our lives have become a little more sensitive to relativity now that you're here.  How long will it be, I wonder, before your supermassiveness seems normal?

- Papa

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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. ...
Post a Comment
Read more