Your First Breath

Yesterday was your one week birthday. I was thinking of little bits and lines that might make for a fitting “one week  birthday” poem. Things about your first breath – your new lungs forcefully exhaling in a never-before-heard cry; the sound reverbrating through the universe -- trumpeting the bigness of your arrival.

But, in truth, you hardly let out a cry at all. At precisely 8:07 a.m. they lifted you into the air – arms and legs flailing as they came all unbundled from the ball you’d curled yourself comfortably to sleep in for all those long months; your grandma cut the cord (because dad said she should – and she thinks it’s beautiful); they set you on my chest; and . . . we all waited for that fresh cry. And then we worried a little. And the nurses lifted you up again and suctioned your little lungs with bulb syringes. And finally, as if to simply get us all to quit our fretting, you acquiesced with one, slight, protesting cry. We all let out approving sighs. And then, while they weighed and measured you, and lifted you about, and even poked you with a needle, you just calmly gazed about – as if being born was the most ordinary thing you’d ever done and no cause for any fuss.

All the same, the earth seemed to respond to that first, stolen, new breath. The universe felt the shift. Acknowledged it. And, in doing so, admitted that you were truly here. And everything was now changed. Forever.