Wonder of the Firstborn: By LAURIE LEE

Courtesy: Medical Miracles, from Readers Digest 1981. November.

From the frontiers of science and the far horizons of personal courage, these stories of medical triumphs and miracles will reaffirm your faith in the awesome powers of the human spirit. Dramatic victories and human triumphs.

Selected and edited by the editors of Readers Digest

She is, of course, just an ordinary miracle, but she is also the particular late wonder of my life.  This girl, my child, this parcel of will and warmth, was born last autumn.  I saw her first lying next to her mother, purple and dented like a bruised plum.  Then the nurse lifted her up and she came suddenly alive, her bent legs kicking crabwise.  Her first living gesture was a thin wrangling of the hands accompanied by a far-out Herbridean lament.

This moment of meeting seemed to be a birth time for both of her first, my second life and us.  Nothing, I knew, would be the same again, and I think I was reasonably shaken.  Then they handed her to me, stiff and howling.  I kissed her, and she went still and quiet, and I was instantly enslaved by her flattery of my powers.

Only a few weeks have passed since that day, but already I’ve felt all the obvious astonishments.  Newborn, of course she looked already a centenarian, exhausted, shrunken, bald, tottering on the brink of an old crone’s grave.  But with each day of survival she has grown younger and fatter, her face filling, drawing on life, every breath of real air healing the birth-death stain she had worn so witheringly.

The rhythmic tides of her sleeping and feeding spaciously measure the days and nights.  Her frail self-absorption is a commanding presence, her helplessness is strong as a rock, so that I find myself event to her silences as though some great engine were purring upstairs.

When awake, and not feeding, she sports and gobbles dryly, like a ruminative jackdaw, or strains and groans and waves her hands about as though casting invisible nets.  I see her hauling in life, groping fiercely with every limb and muscle, working blind at a task no one can properly share, in darkness where she is still alone. Each night I take her to bed like a book and lie close and study her.  Her dark-blue eyes stare straight into mine, but off-center, not seeing me.  Already, I suppose, I should be afraid for her future, but I am more concerned with mine.  I fear perhaps her first acute recognition, her first questions, and the first man she makes of me.  But for the moment she stares idly through me, at the pillow, at the light on the wall.

Meanwhile, as I study her, I find her early strangeness insidiously claiming a family face.  Here she is, brand-new, my daughter whom I must guard.  A year ago this space was empty; not even a hope for her was in it.  Now she’s here with our name upon her, and no one will call in the night to reclaim her.  She will grow, learn to run in the garden, run back and call this home.  Or will she?

All those quick lively tendrils seem so vulnerable to their own recklessness—surely she’ll fall on the fire or roll down some crevice or kick herself out of the window?  I look at those weaving hands and complicated ears, the fit of the skin around that delicate body, and I realize I’m succumbing to the new-parenthood shakes.  My daughter is so new to me still that I can’t yet leave her alone; I have to keep digging her out of her sleep to make sure that she’s really alive.

Her face is a sheaf of masks, which she shuffles through aimlessly.  I watch eerie rehearsals of those emotions she will one day need, random, out-of-sequence, but already exact, automatic, yet strangely knowing: a quick pucker of fury, a puff of ho-hum boredom, a beaming after-dinner smile, perplexity, slyness, a sudden wrinkling of grief, popeyed interest, fat-lipped love.  Ever since I was handed this living heap of expectations, I can feel nothing but simple awe.

What have I got exactly?  And what am I going to do with her?  And what for that matter will she do with me?

I have got a daughter, whose life is already separate from mine, whose will already follows its own directions, and who has quickly corrected my wooly preconceptions of her by being herself.  I am merely the keeper of her temporary helplessness.  With luck, she can alter me; indeed, is doing so now.  She will give me more than she gets, and may even later become my keeper.

But if I could teach her anything at all, by unloading upon her some of the ill-tied parcels of my years, I’d like it to be acceptance and a holy relish for life.  To accept with gladness the fact of being a woman—when she’ll find all nature to be on her side.  If pretty, to thank God and enjoy her luck.  To be willing to give pleasure without feelings loss of face, to prefer charm to the vanity of aggression, and not to deliver her powers and mysteries into the opposite camp by whishing to compete with men.

In this way, I believe—though some of her sisters disapprove—she might know some happiness and also spread some around.

And, as a brief tenant of this precious and irreplaceable world I’d ask her to preserve life both in herself and others.  To prefer always Societies for the Propagation and Promotion of rather than those for the Abolition or Prevention of.

I’d ask her never to persecute others for the sins hidden in herself, nor to seek justice in terms of vengeance; to avoid like a plague all acts of mob righteousness and to accept her frustrations and faults as her own personal burden, and not to blame them too often, if she can possibly help it, or young or old, whites of blacks, East, West, Jews, Gentiles, television or bingo.

For the rest, may she be my own salvation, for any man’s child is his second chance.  In this role I see her leading me back to my beginnings, reopening rooms I’d locked and forgotten, and stirring the dust in my mind by re-asking the big questions—as any child can do.  With my tardy but bright-eyed pathfinder I shall return to that wood which long ago I fled from but which together we may now enter and know.