The Unexamined Life . . .

. . . Socrates said that it wasn't worth living, and thither goeth only one of the many differences between me and Socrates.

Fittingly enough, as soon as I had the above sentence written a while back, Allison Clare started crying--we think her upper teeth are coming in--and that was the end of my ruminations. Subsequent attempts have been similarly foiled.

But anyway, as I was saying:

My life prior to Allison Clare's arrival and my marriage to Sam was marked by its quietude, and my spiritual life had a strongly contemplative component. I remember whole periods dayslong where I did not speak to another person as I painted the various rooms of my old house during school breaks. I was busy--at times much busier than I am now--but I had a lot of privacy. And by that, I don't mean that I had a lot of opportunity for secrets; I mean that I enjoyed during that time a gift of self-determined time and space.

Given how much I enjoyed it, it's been surprising to me that I've missed it so little. Every day, my schedule, energy level, and lists of tasks curve around the schedule, energy level, and needs of this wiggly little person, from being awakened by her cooes or cries in the morning to checking the volume of the baby monitor by the bed before going to sleep. I grade with her on the couch next to me waving a teething ring, write lecture notes with her on my lap reaching for the keyboard, pack her off with me to pick up copies at the office; I plan dinners that can finish cooking by themselves while I put her to bed at 6:30; I coordinate every extra meeting or conference with my husband so that we can hand her off between us.

Maybe it's all a function of those hormones (whose potency I'll never doubt since they reorganized my body to grow an extra set of bones and organs, right down to fingernails and a full head of hair, then decided when it was done and began moving things back to more or less their original state. More in some places, and less in others, to be fair. Not that the whole thing was anything more than billions of women have done. I'm just saying: new one for me personally.). But I feel like I've been on some really great drugs since Allison Clare was born, with a perpetual sense of contentment and wellbeing in spite of the lack of sleep, constancy of work, and new list of cares.

In part, this sense of ease in the world makes me feel, as I started to write, way less contemplative. Which could be good, as I was prone to what JS called "Eeyore-ish" phases in my prior state. In those moods, the lacunae in my faith were laid bare, as if it were a piece of knitting I'd been working on and spread out for the first time to discover, to my dismay and sometimes shame, tons of dropped stitches, with all the world looking on.

I don't miss those times, but feeling wrapped in warmth and oxytocin-induced coziness, I wonder about what faith means, or should mean, now. It used to mean intense contemplation, identifying where things had gone wrong, unraveling and reworking the yarns of my character. Yes, it was self-absorbed, but in the way that physical therapy is self-absorbed.

Now seems like a time decidedly not for that practice of examen; it's a time to be present, to rejoice in the wonder of my little girl's discovery of the world--the scritch of her tiny fingernails on the corduroy of the big chair where her dad once placed a ring on my finger, the little gasp of delight she gives when reintroduced to a favorite book or toy, the triumphant beaming grin when (with a little help) she stands up for the first time each day.

Before we had the baby, I once told Joan and Frank that I was hoping that it wouldn't change everything completely. I guess they enjoyed that remark a lot afterward, between themselves--and they probably still do, as they are good-humored, long-memoried folks. But I think I still have the same desire, in a sense. Not because I don't want the experience of having and loving Allison Clare to transform me utterly, but because I also don't want to lose those many things I loved and worked and prayed for before. Perhaps it's partly just a matter of trusting, or hoping, that all of those old stitches hold.