A baby is a miracle

Sunday Star Times June 17, 2018

Karren Beanland and Mary-Margaret Slack.

A baby's no big deal. It may change the way you think and live and feel but apart from that, no big deal really. 

We weren't even going to have one.

We thought it should only happen if you were committed with all your heart. But then friends became adoptive parents and we learned for the first time about years of trying and anguish, and we wondered what we were doing. 

And soon there is a sketchy scan with a tiny spine and somehow the doctor also knows it's a girl. And you think: what do I know about this, but a baby comes anyway and here she is and you look at Karren, holding her close and full of love and more spent and exhausted than you have ever seen her and you take the news to the family and you hug Karren's mother and you both cry and she will remind you forever after and you will just say "you bet I did."

And then the baby's home and she is in a tiny bassinet beside your bed and you listen to the tiny breaths and when none comes you nudge the bassinet and thank God she stirs.

And then she is in her own little room in her own little cot and you have put a frieze of animals around the wall and there is a mobile of stuffed animals above the cot and after her bath and the soothing music she is warm and snug and you fly each animal above her and say "here comes" … dramatic pause … "horsey! And here comes … elephant!" And her eyes dance and she beams and gurgles.

And this little gurgling helpless bundle, the book says, will one day crawl and talk, but really how will that ever happen? And then she is warbling and burbling and it's the prettiest trilling and gargling of random syllables and then she is crawling and she is walking and she is talking and you move through it all like a car through fog, forgetting how different things were just days and weeks before, and it is happening at jet speed but it is also like tunnelling to Australia with a teaspoon, and you think this particularly as you stand behind her in a swing, pushing, again and again and again. 

And she will say to you whenever you do anything fun "again again": the Dr Seuss books, Badjelly, The Wiggles and their chugga chugga big red car, the zoo visits, the meerkats, the Thomas engines, the jokes.

And the trilling syllables turn into words and she has her own ones. The glass pane in the roof is the skyling, the pretty thing in the garden is a Monica butterfly. She has so very many words. On holiday, in a lagoon, the boat captain asks as we're getting out: "She has an off switch?" And we say no she does not and we do not think this is at all a bad thing. We have a talker.

And the child you couldn't entirely imagine walking loves to move, and first there is one dance class a week and then a second and then a third and then she's 8 and 10 and 12 and the dancing is everything, and she has pictures of dancers on the wall, and then One Direction, and she and her friends are in love with Harry Styles and they are noticing the boy on the train with the floppy hair.

And then the posters are of Cara Delevingne and other thinspo heroines and she is actually asking you one day how many calories they got each day in Auschwitz and things get ever more bleak and ever more severe until it reaches hospital. And her life is in the hands of people who mercifully know exactly how to bring her back and they do and she is made whole and your gratitude is beyond words. 

And now, made whole, here is an assured young woman on stage doing comedy, and here she is hosting on student radio, and here she is at university planning a life in London, and that little sketch of a spine and a garble of syllables has turned into something quite magical.

And it's no big deal really, but if you get the chance to have a baby, you should definitely look into it.