There's a newborn sleeping quietly next to me. He's the greatest thing I've ever created; better than all my writings combined. As luck would have it, he seems to be as quiet as his mother, only fussing when he really needs something. I have a good, strong, healthy son, and nothing in the world gives me greater pleasure, or sense of purpose.
The night of my wife's labor was one of the scariest in our lives. Her difficult labor served as an emotional catalyst for the end result, a priming of the senses for an ultimate release; that glorious emotion that only a parent can know- the redemption of success after an agonizing tribulation, when the clutches of despair shortens one's breath. To see your whole family alive after worrying they were about to die is the most terrifyingly joyous emotion imaginable. It's no joke that I wept tears of profound joy in my mother's arms after my wife finally pushed that baby out. She was literally on her last breath when it happened, crying out for a C-section as a group of doctors hovered over her. One more failed contraction would have put both their lives in serious jeopardy.
The baby grunts, waves his arms and feet, seems to dream a lot, opens his mouth like it were an involuntary valve of inhalation. He will suck on anything his mouth comes close to, in imitation of a soured tongue perpetually aggravated. This must be why Freud was so fixated on the oral stages of newborn growth; he surely must have been around quite a few babies in order to analyze what must be going on inside their heads.
To me it's less of a mystery. All the experimental movement and noise he's making is simply his body acclimatizing to being outside a womb. It must have been terribly traumatizing for him to be induced out of a place he'd felt so comfortable in. Now the challenge is in keeping him warm and comfortable enough to embrace this enormous transition he is making. And the ones we are making as well. Each day will get easier as we learn the tricks of parenting, we hope.
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