The Journey of Killian J. Kling: June 2007

Sunday, June 24, 2007

Rest in peace Great Grandma Mimi 12/10/26 - 06/23/07

I'm so glad I got to meet you.
Love always, Killian

The blog entries that never were…until now. (lucky you.)

Prior to his birth, my mind wondered into territories of the abstract, thinking about the criteria that this child would have to fulfill in order for me to fully love him...or her, as the case was. Weighing on my mind was the unsettling thought that perhaps there’s a chance that I won’t love this person- or moreover even like it. I would find myself going back and forth about silly things like; will I love it more if it’s a boy, or a girl? Will I love it more if it is born bald, or what if it has a thick reddish fro like Orphan Annie? What if my child did in fact have a cleft lip, which at one point was deemed a possibility by some specialists. “What if?” Echoed in my head like the pummeling of a racquetball in the small square court like confines of my brain.
And then he was born. This blue, slimy, creature slides out from what was previously his home for the past nine months (ten technically.) He was a hybrid of Golem, ET, and a collagen injected Smurf. Yet, there in my latex gloved hands and in his most repulsive, disgusting, state- I fell in love. There is no “what if?”
Everyday my love for this kid grows exponentially. It’s indescribable, really. And with this love, already comes the sad thoughts of the day where this little boy will shy away from my kisses. When he won’t let me kiss him all over his face, his lips, eyebrows, ears, hands and feet. The day he won’t be at my disposal to pick up and hug whenever I want. Where on my shoulder wont be his first choice of places to lay his head.
“Welcome to parenthood, son.” I hear some avuncular voice sounding from a far off celestial plane, or maybe just in the small square confines of my brain. And though I’m at the very beginning stages of parent-hood, I feel I am finally beginning to understand it. Understand what makes this kind of love different than anything else human being experience. I’m thankful to be given the opportunity.
(Wow, sappy enough for ya?)

Farmers Markets: Great for fresh produce and child abuse.

Today we took Killian to the farmers market down the street from us. This trip is one of the first public trips we’ve taken him on, and to be honest it wasn’t really a choice he probably would have made being given one. You see, the market only stays open until 1 PM, so we needed to get there if we were to get our fresh collard greens for dinner. (which we did get, and did eat for dinner. And they were tasty by the way.) However in order to go, we needed to secure Killian in his stroller, which is sometimes tricky to do without waking him up. It was a hot sunny day, and we’d brought along one of his blankets so we could create a canopy of sorts over his stroller in order to protect him from the blazing Sunday afternoon sun. He didn’t take too keenly to being awakened from his noon nap and so to spite us decided he’d be fussy for the majority of our time out of the house. Actually he was completely fine on our walk to the market, and only decided to get cranky when we were passing a woman, a stranger mind you, who deemed it her responsibility to tell us that our makeshift canopy was making him too hot, and that it was “child-abuse.”
Now, I can appreciate a fellow citizen’s concern when it comes to the well being of babies, and children and even sometimes the elderly, and honestly- if it wasn’t my child that this woman was talking about, I probably would have agreed with her. But what changes when you’re the parent of said child, is that you have first-hand experience as to all the events that lead up to this moment, and how the little one typically reacts to just about everything. In short, you know the history. So when some stranger tells you that you are abusing your child- right or wrong, you wanna rip their head off and drop kick it into the kettle corn popper. “I’ll give you abuse! Shut the ----- up!”
I guess my point is either, I’m a really defensive father, or that I now get why some parents get really defensive. The reality is that we all think we know better, but often don’t know a person’s situation until we’ve walked in their shoes. But, I don’t have to do that to know that I DO know better than everyone…about everything.