Jane

By Crispin Sartwell

When she came out into the world in early morning, she was a pink/purple, fluid-drenched mass of flesh, laying in the midwife's hands. Then she lurched into her first breath and in an instant became animate.

Jane Winik Sartwell was born at 4:52 AM on the summer solstice. With that first breath, even before her cord was cut, she became a person with us. Her color changed to something more recognizably human as the blood stirred beneath her skin. She moved, and for the first time she found her voice and gave her first breath back into the new world.

As her usually-heathen mother Marion said a few hours later, "it kind of makes you believe in something." For as mammalian as it is to conceive and give live birth to a child, it also has an aspect of the miraculous. With each push I saw the top of the head get closer to the world and then with a yell Marion opened like a flower and Jane's head emerged. Then in another push her shoulders, and she had come to us and into the first day.

In a few hours we were home. Marion nursed Jane and then laid her down on our bed. And then her sister Emma, Marion and I just stared at her for a half hour, as if we were warming our hands at the fire of her life.

What having a baby shows you is that people are not separate from one another. Marion had felt the stirring for months inside her and I could watch Jane moving under the skin of Marion's belly.

But even more, the emergence of a new person changes everybody around her. I had the sense as I held my new daughter that my life started over again from the moment of her birth: that I was someone different now as her father than I had been before.

The birth itself refreshed my sense of being alive. And caring for her changes my day and my sense of what is real and important and true.

As someone who has been raising children for some years already, I know that each stage of your child's life is a new stage of your life, that parent of a newborn or of a toddler or of an adolescent is not something that you do, but something that you are.

At Jane's birth, Marion and I became parents together, and Jane teaches us together about partnership and patience and love. She is the embodiment of our marriage and its seasonal transformation, its ripeness.

The shape of our day and hence of our life is transformed by the proliferating act of care: changing diapers, singing lullabies, holding. And our sense of what is meaningful is also transformed: what's significant isn't what's out there in the future or some vision of success, but what is right here right now: the baby is crying.

As birth becomes care, the miraculous becomes routine, but the routine also becomes miraculous. The life of our baby is our life too.

On that first morning in that new season, Jane gave birth to us.

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