When you have a baby, you spend a lot of time in the dark. Everyone talks about the light, and the infusion of joy. Thankfully, I’ve had those in abundance too. From the first touch I’ve been looped into a seemingly limitless circuit of buoyancy, my body saturated with delight every time I make contact with my daughter. It has been the first effortless thing in my entire life. (Though the maze to it was not.) So I’m not overlooking fthe light. Because it is there so unshakably, I can look at the dark, and try to see without looking away. Which means being in the dark, being with the dark, without resistance or fear.
I’ve spent thousands of hours in the dark in the past 7 months. The conditions of possibility for my time in the dark need mention — because I am currently unemployed by choice, living off my savings as long as possible in order to be with my daughter full time, I am with her all night and for nearly every nap. This is a luxury, a genuine gift, and informs the perspective I share here. I offer a story particular to us; it is not a lesson, or a generalizable norm. Though I do intend there to be some shareable glints of resonance.
Darkness alters your consciousness. I entered the dark already in an altered state of consciousness. Due to the hormonal alterations of the post-birth period, the off-kilter pattern of sleep in newborn life, and my abiding shock at my pregnancy, I sat in the dark in those early months in a state of suspension.
My eyes—and heart—were fully dilated, but my soul was afloat in the grainy whisper of light in her room. I kept trying to focus, to be able to encompass the surreal enormity of a baby human in my arms, until I realized that all I could do was release myself to the dimness, and that giving over to the dark, to the alterations of mind and soul it requires, would open a different kind of clarity. If I could relax into its uncertainties, its ability to hold the enormous reality of my daughter’s existence, its shadows would bring me the truth.
The truth that opened for me in all those hours, once I let go of trying to pinpoint the causes and nature of the immense and spectacular circumstance in which I found myself—and the sheer mind-blowing fact of a baby being in your house—is that life is an open field of uncontainable and largely un-parseable wonders. Or, it can be experienced as such when a particular combination of events thrusts you away from the understandable, away from mental attempts to grasp it all and the pushy desire for all the newness to sink in, and shifts you instead into a constant porous state of arrival and surprise. Me having a baby was just never going to sink in, in whatever ways I had expected that to feel like. The darkness was my wake-up call to let the expectation go, and to move on into a whole new world of emotions and responses to the life (and lives) I live in and amidst.
To be in the dark as a new mother has also been an extended experience of reckoning. The dark matched my feelings of being in the dark about how to do all the things one does with babies. I had zero prior experience with children and no base know-how to draw upon. The flood of things to know would wash over me, into the darkened corners of her room, pressing me into a deep humility about the forms of knowledge I had prized and the forms of knowledge I had neglected or overlooked.
But once I sat in the flood for several months, in the saturation of particulate darkness in which your eyes gradually adjust, the waters ceased to overwhelm and became instead a bath, a cleansing away of the surface concerns that mis-filtered my eyes onto new motherhood, making possible a slower way of seeing, an ease for my eyes in which my soul could transport itself through the fleshly calibrations—both subtle and gigantic—required to be present to my re-created life, and needed for the darkness to become a nourishing abode.
Most of all, it was in the darkness that she brought me the truth too. About 4 or so months in, at some untraceable time of the night, I looked over at her, to find her looking over at me. She was about a foot away, close enough for that kind of shared looking where intimate and mysterious energy or presence gets discharged in a massive way, quietly making the moment a pivot of experience in which the felt sense of everything amplifies, and settles. It was the first time we had that kind of shared looking; in the newborn months babies look at you, but a kind of distance remains in that the gaze isn’t exactly reciprocal. It is partly why, in spite of all the bodily proximity and intimacy, it can feel like you are living with a beloved stranger in those early months.
But then something begins to shift, and evolve, in the baby’s development, and, in tandem, your relationship with her. Instead of looking at each other you begin to look with each other. The first time I experienced this shift, it happened to be in the dark. It sent a thrill of goosebumps through my entire body. She of course seemed nonplussed by the change—as with most every other change that emerges from her, it is like she is stepping back into a familiar and ancient way of being, her fully formed soul simply unfurling a petal at a time, taking care to reveal itself at a pace we adult humans can manage.
Shared looks in the dark have an especially arresting and piercing character. It was no different with her, and the absence of a verbal component only intensified the rich moment of suspension. The haze of the dark made the sustained moment possible, even as it made something crystalline clear: She wants all of me without hesitation, and her innate state is to open intimacy between us without fear or trepidation. She beheld me with the freedom of a being who has no hang-ups of a personal history, and has come to us with only the goodness and mammalian magic of the ancient past.
I knew instantly she was opening something—inviting something—that I’ve never quite been able to do, or that I haven’t quite allowed myself to be: Intimate with abandon. That is what her gaze beckoned, and because it was through the darkness, because she somehow unconsciously knew to catch me in that space of suspension and alteration, I couldn’t not see the light she offered.