Proof

I'm posting these photos of the little man so that I can look at them when he's crying and convince myself that it will pass. Yesterday, between approximately noon and 1am this morning, I would have been looking at them most of the time, because the monster was screaming, shuddering, wailing, burping, thrashing, squealing, kicking, and screeching for about 45-minutes of every hour during that time period. At these times, it's like trying to calm an angry cat.

Don't say colic. Let's just call it the post-womb individuation period ... or something.

I'm sure the neighbors watch me walking around and around the balcony that wraps around our house, clutching a screaming baby, and are completely reminded of Michael Jackson. Maybe I should show them these photos too.

Goodbye

Saying goodbye is never easy. And not being given a chance to do so is even harder. Emeline and I lost a good friend this week, suddenly, unexpectedly, like a hole in the world opening up, swallowing a person, and clamping firmly closed again. Paul shared an office with Emeline and he and his girlfriend -- two English doctors, working here in Dunedin -- supported us throughout E's pregnancy in a quiet, caring and decent way.

We'd had dinner and drinks with them one night six-months or so ago. We chatted at work functions. Later we went to a barbecue at their house, perched on the cliffs above St Clair beach. Paul and I stood on a little patch of grass behind the house and watched big slow waves pounding the coast. And we'd see Paul and Leanne in the crowds at every film festival at the Regent Theatre downtown -- Paul's curly hair was easily visible from half a theatre away. I told Paul once that I didn't know what I'd do if Max had curly hair like he did.

Paul was my surrogate sometimes, denying access to his and Emeline's office to anyone with a cold or a cough; or telling Emeline to leave the office and go somewhere else when workmen were drilling above it, or when the smell of fresh paint in the corridors was too strong.

Max was born just after midnight 10-days ago, on the Saturday before Christmas, and he came home the following Monday. As we carried him across the road to our car, we bumped into Paul. He was our first friend to meet Max. Hugs and handshakes. And Paul was moved and expansive, visibly touched to be seeing the little man who had steadily inflated Emeline's belly until she was almost perfectly round.

And then yesterday, on Sunday, just 5-days later, we switch on the TV and see Paul's photo on the news: Died in a jet boat accident in Wanaka on Boxing Day. It's his departmental work photo, which I see every day: earnest look on his young face, blue jacket that looks like it was obtained quickly for the photo, and a headful of only slightly tamed curly brown hair.

Gone. Here for a while, and then gone. He was 29-years-old -- a young and energetic doctor, far from home. We wish now that we'd spent more time with him, but we seemed to have plenty of time: émigrés far from home in a strange city will always have something to talk about. The world was a better place for Paul having been in it; but I think it would have been better still if he had been given a chance to be in it a little longer. Not so long ago I wrote that our son Max had gone from being an idea to a person overnight. Now our friend Paul has gone from being a person to an idea. He was a wonderful, decent, intelligent, careful, enthusiastic and funny person. The idea of him is just as wonderful and rich and complicated. And that hasn't gone anywhere.

We'll miss you Paul, but we're so glad to have the idea of you.

The First Week: Mission Possible

Our little man changes every day, growing into his baggy pink skin like a puppy. We need to be patient. I feel sometimes like I'm nursing someone through a long sickness that makes him useless.

And he is absolutely useless! A beautiful little useless boy, whose arms and legs shoot out like a string puppet's and scare him awake, and who scratches his own face. We've carefully studied every inch of his body and pronounce him the most wonderful single word you can give to a newborn baby. He's normal.

Seven days in: three hourly feeds; nearly a hundred diapers; not enough naps; and a lot of miles walked around this house, bouncing, burping, coaxing, and whispering in every room, making deals with him for two hours of silence. I already owe him a lot of money. And when he finally sleeps, we perch over him and study his face vigilantly. We are always on high alert. I was just brewing a pot of coffee in the kitchen, while Emeline fed Max in the bedroom, and I panicked when the coffeemaker started to splutter water through the grounds. It sounded just like Max struggling with wind.

I nearly swaddled the coffeemaker. That would not have been good.

At 12:15am yesterday we celebrated his first week with us. He didn't join in. He was feeding. We've realized that most things on earth, small and large, happen while Max is feeding or hiccuping. The sun comes up over the peninsula, burning off the clouds in the valley. He hiccups. The sky behind the house gets dark again, as the clouds over the sea turn purple and violet. He hiccups. It rains. The wind blows. A car backfires. He's still hiccuping.

Our lives are brightly filled with wonder now, and the source of it lies swaddled, frowning and oblivious.

And hiccuping.

Eating

For a little while today, we saw some light at the end of our tunnel. Our little baby Max, who has been stubborn and impatient when it comes to feeding, is starting to get the hang of the things. The change is huge. It feels like taking a boulder off your chest where you've been carrying it for the last six days.

When a baby doesn't want to feed and it's 4am, and he's bright red, hot and angry and wriggling like a cat, what do you do?

You keep trying. And Max has his own rules. For instance: sleep is completely overrated.

So the days become a list of feeding times, by which we start to measure our success. Feeding every 3-hours is the goal. Any less is failure. The writing on the list starts to look a little ragged at 11pm, worse at 1am, almost unreadable by 3am, and by 5am the scrawl on the paper is unfamiliar symbols. The missed feeds. The walking up and down the hallway, bouncing. The bouncing. Bouncing. I'm bouncing as I type.

And then a new day begins.

As our midwife says, Max suddenly has to learn to breathe, swallow and suck all at the same time. That doesn't sound so easy. And then once he's got the hang of it, he's full of wind and doesn't know what to do. It must be very traumatic to have to learn all this by yourself after 10-months of laziness in a nice, warm, cozy spot.

And as I've said to Emeline on an hourly basis since Max arrived in our lives: millions of years of evolution and human development, and this is what we get? I can understand if a baby doesn't get the hang of long division, or punctuation ... but eating?

Let's try harder, folks. As a species. Can we do that?

A little finger

Max and Emeline are home. Our house looks like a disaster area. You'd think a battalion of soldiers stayed here for a few days while we were at the hospital: dirty mugs, pillows, shoes, clothes, used Kleenex, towels, books, newspapers, chaos, disorder. The lights are on in every room, all the time. It's hard to believe that the person most responsible for this mess weighs only 7-pounds, and measures nearly 21-inches.

There are things no one prepares you for. Everyone talks about the beautiful smell of a baby. Come and smell ours then. Phew! He's losing the little bit of umbilical cord left behind by the clamps and it smells like the end of a pier. Truthfully, just like the end of a pier. Hopefully, this doesn't last too long.

I've already learned a useful trick, though. If he's screaming, just stick your finger in the hole. No one can scream with a finger in his mouth. Try it with your own mouth and your own finger. It's not possible. I'm reminded of the story about the little boy who stuck his finger in a hole in a dam, and stopped the water from coming through. I mean, once I've stopped the screaming with my little finger, what do I do then?

A Long Day

This morning, I left the hospital at about 8am after a long night watching and helping my baby being born. It was rainy and wet and gray outside. Sleep deprivation seemed to flatten everything and made me feel like I was walking through two dimensions. On the other side of the road, in the exact parking spot where I'd parked our temperamental Subaru 12-hours earlier, was a car that looked identical to it. But it wasn't the same car. It couldn't be. Because everything has changed.

When I parked our car there on Friday night, Emeline was puffing inside it and reciting the alphabet to try to stay calm through her contractions. That afternoon, I had been keeping track of the contractions by writing the time they arrived on the back of my hand. Outside the hospital, I fussed over our bags and asked Emeline, whose eyes were tightly closed and hidden beneath a frown, whether I should get back in the car and move it forward a foot or two so that it was better placed in its parking spot. Surprisingly, she was non-committal.

We now live in a vastly different parallel universe. Overnight, it became an alternate world. In this new world a boy with hairy shoulders called Maxwell Ezra Kemp, who has an English mouth and a Filipino nose, controls everything we do.

He wasn't here, and now he is. Between Friday and Saturday, an idea became a person. Life was simple, and now it is beautiful.

Maxwell Kemp: Whatever he wants, he shouts for it.

Does that make any sense?

Maxwell Ezra Kemp: December 20th, 2008.

Supposedly, a picture is worth a thousand words. And I have no words. So, pictures should do just fine for now. Perhaps later the words will come.