And The World Keeps on Spinning

Knowing you are going to have a baby for nine and a half months in many ways seems like just the right amount of time. I don’t know about other parents out there, but when I first saw that pregnancy test come back as positive my heart stopped for a moment. It was like experiencing the greatest joy I had ever felt, and yet I also felt the greatest sense of fear I had ever felt. This was for real. We were going to have a baby!

Nine and a half months just seems like the right amount of time. I might have written about that before in another post, but it really is true. It’s like you’re warming up to the realities of what it means to be a parent. At five months there is no way I would have been ready to be a dad. But I was a lot more ready than I was at three months. As time moved on, the more ready I felt.

For me, one of the first thoughts I had when I found out Sarah was pregnant was a line in the movie “Lost in Translation” where Bill Murray is talking with Scarlett Johansson about what it is like to have a kid.

Bob: It gets a whole lot more complicated when you have kids.
Charlotte: It’s scary.
Bob: The most terrifying day of your life is the day the first one is born.
Charlotte: Nobody ever tells you that.
Bob: Your life, as you know it… is gone. Never to return.

But they learn how to walk, and they learn how to talk… and you want to be with them. And they turn out to be the most delightful people you will ever meet in your life.

Charlotte: That’s nice.

That one line stood out to me. “Life, as you know it…is gone. Never to return.”

But as the life I knew has left Sarah and me, I am adjusting to what is our new life. Of course everyone tells us to enjoy the time when he is this small as much as we can. “They just grow up so fast. It’s in a blink of an eye!”

I understand. Micah is so cute. He is so small. He is so precious. And Sarah and I are doing the best we can to enjoy this time of the three of our lives.

The thing is, even though our lives have dramatically changed the world around us has not. Everything has continued to go on as normal. Classes have continued meeting. Meetings have continued to take place. But you’d like to think that when your first baby is born that everyone around you will slow down for you, too. You’d like to think that you’re professors will give you grace when it comes to the expectations for their classes. But that really is only minimally true. People understand that I can’t come to class when I’m at the hospital. That makes sense. It’s after that time that is the issue. They don’t seem understand that it’s really hard to get any reading or homework done when you have friends and family visiting and when you have a baby crying every couple hours and needing to be fed.

I understand. Life don’t stop for nobody.

And in reality, how could I expect it to? In an ideal world, what would I have my professors do? Give me all semester to turn in a paper or read a book? I don’t know. But why aren’t there any standards set up for students who have babies or people who lose loved ones? I feel like it is a somewhat normal occurrence  People like me who feel like their world has slowed down, when in reality the world just keeps on spinning at the same speed it has been since the beginning of time.