She clenches her tiny fists and her untroubled brow furrows. She wails, squirming in my arms. I hand the newborn to the nurse, who will take her, clean her and bundle the small creature into warm blankets, but I can’t linger on the miracle of even my own grandchild. I’m one of five doctors in delivery and we had an abnormally large number of mothers that day.
I hurried on to the next room, till evening, when the evening-shift. I made a last-time scrub-down, stuffed my duds into the hamper and went out to wait for my husband. I’d called him during lunch and now we were going up to see our daughter.
Really, I’d only thought a few times: when my oldest was born, when my youngest was born, and today, when I delivered my own grandchild for the first time.
This tiny little creature makes eye contact with you, and you wonder: her eyes are blue, before the iris thickens; innocent, full of ambiguity, unknowing…but you get the feeling she, in all her innocence, knows more than you. Tired, she turns, absorbing all the warmth she can from you, and sleeps.
It takes her a painfully abbreviated year for her skull to cover the softness of her brain. Now is the time when she develops her base morals, good, bad, right, wrong. All and a few more. If she learns them wrongly, it might ruin her life.