This is not about the new life we are all experiencing due to the Corona Virus Pandemic. This is about a New Life our family has been graced with during this very difficult time.
A few days ago, Baby T. was born into a world that is not only unknown to her but also pretty darn strange to everyone who has been awaiting her arrival. While most grandparents are flexing their infant-memory muscles prior to a birth, the four of us are ensuring that we are COVID-negative. How weird is that? What is not weird is that this new life seems like a 6 pound, 11 ounce miracle. She is perfectly formed, down to her tiny fingernails. She has figured out how to nurse, and she is definite about when to rest and when to fuss. Though we can’t know now who she is—her personality, her way of sizing up the world—it is already there and we will discover it in time.
I can hardly write this without choking up. Since March our daily lives and the foreseeable future have changed in unimaginable ways. We do not know what lies ahead. I have good days and difficult days, trying to deal with isolation, anxiety, and innumerable changes as I navigate through an unforeseen way of living. And then Baby T. shows up and a blessed peace descends: it is pure happiness.
I had many expectations of the birth of our second grandchild, but I never expected the joy, the suffusion of happiness her birth has brought. For the past five months of our altered life I have been trying to savor happy moments: family, nature, clouds, good weather. But this is different. The birth of a child at this time is a gob-smacking dose of joy that is indescribable. Thank you, little girl. If all goes well, you will never fully understand what your birth at this particular time means to us.
