Late summer, 2010, I thought it would be great to become pregnant nine months before one’s wedding anniversary (and I blogged about that elsewhere, still there); or nine months before one's own birthday, or nine months before spring—a poetic assertion of one's own sense of home and gardening.
Some weeks later, I wrote a wonderful posting here (if I may say so), worth recalling (though not wholly about parenting).
Over the years, I’ve loved knowing couples in early parenting, being a friend of the family, like a vicarious in-law. It’s been a good reason to start friendships.
Though I don’t have children of my own, I’m an expert child development resource (if I may say so)—surely, partly compensatory (fine)—and I have a large library of materials on child development. That’s why I was so enthused about getting philosophical about parenting, some years ago. To any reader here, that might seem to have been some kind of disembodied relationship to “ontogeny”; but it was actually a then-newly conceptual complement to longstanding, “down-to-earth” (as they say) or realistic, embodied rapport with little beings. (OK: I never grew up—thank goodness.)
My love of the notion of the Inner Child in creativity is kindred (an idea I share with the Jungian tradition of individuational psychology, though I outgrew the especially-Jungian version of individuation, I think) .
I wrote, summer, 2010 (in small part),…
… your happiness is clear and inspiring, which will be so clear and inspiring for your children, who will feel the pervasive happiness of your home in their bones….you’re now destined to live happily ever after because you truly, freely came to know your heart.O what a story there may be in ellipses, reaching into horizons of years to come. What is the liminality of reality and fiction?
I could mine my archive on child development by era of a life, writing soon about early infancy, then write about later months of infancy months later here; write about the first year of childhood a year-or-so from now—year after year, mixing autobiography, musing, and conceptual things—endless fun for a child who would discover way, way into their life that the play was all for her or his mother, until I died.
She named the son Gary, or the daughter Ana. That would be a story! Call it all to be part of the early 21st century for a hopelessly horizoning (if not overly precious) Child.
