Baby Transitions
The title’s a double-entendre. The video (Quicktime version or this Windows Media version) consists of a series of segments of my 14-month-old daughter rolling around on the floor, connected by a series of video transitions.
Yet baby Emily is in transition herself. She just began walking on Saturday (but refused bipedal locomotion for the camera). And she has begun attending daycare twice a week (to allow me time to launch a new business).
And the videographer’s in transition, too.
It’s been almost a year since I gave up my business in favor of full-time fatherhood. Now I’m anxious to get back out in the world and create something, something I believe will enrich the community and provide for my family.
Yet I hate the idea of giving up my days with Emily. I never got to feed my other kids every day when they were babies, never got to rock them to sleep at naptime or hear them waking up in their cribs. Never got to watch them at earnest play, learning about spatial relationships and soaking in vocabulary and experimenting to see how their bodies can move and bend.
It took months, but I came to accept and enjoy my temporary role as stay-at-home dad, and I’d like to keep taking care of my little girl. But I can’t take care of her and conduct business at the same time. And we can’t provide her with the things we believe she’ll need as she grows up unless I get back to work.
So it eventually happens that, just as with her older brothers and sister, Emily will have to rely on hired helpers to provide her with milk and food and shelter during the day. That’s what family life has become for most middle-class Americans. Emily’s brothers and sister have turned out to be pretty good humans, and I feel certain she’ll turn out well, too.
A big part of me still doesn’t want to give her up, though.
→ B.Dunn, Apr 11, 2005, 03 31 pm
