Singing in the Dark

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Tuesday, March 23rd, 2021 - 10:51am.

I’ve had some Big Things happen to me in my lifetime. My parents got divorced and remarried other people, we moved from suburban Minneapolis to rural Minnesota, I left for college out of state, I moved to Spain for a year, then I moved to France where I learned a new language, a new culture and made a life for myself from scratch. In France, I fell in love and after six years together, I very nearly had that love snatched away. After his long hospital stay and the hardest months of our lives, when it was clear he would make it, we said: let’s have a baby! It was a way of turning the page, embracing life and starting a new chapter. Other friends our age were having babies and some confided how hard it was...we would smile sympathetically, but then give each other a knowing look: Hard? We know about hard. And having a baby isn’t hard.

During my pregnancy I read John Irving’s “A Prayer for Owen Meany.” There’s a passage describing new parents:

A few houses down Front Street lived a young couple with a new baby, Front Street was not much a street for young couples, and the street had only one new baby. The couple cruised the neighborhood with the air of an entirely novel species -- as if they were the first couple in New Hampshire to have given birth. Owen shrieked so loudly when we played football that the young father or mother from down the street would fretfully appear, popping up over a hedge to ask us if we would keep our voices down “...because of the baby.”

I remember chuckling at that part and then reading on from my picnic blanket in the sun in Les Buttes Chaumont park.

Six months later we welcomed our little boy. We sent out an SMS to our circle of friends announcing his name, weight and the exact time of his birth. It’s a funny tradition, but I understand the desire: Elliot was born at 5:29am on February 3rd, 2013, that is the exact instant he joined the world.

Included in the recipients of that SMS was my yoga teacher at the time...she’d recently given birth to her second child, and we’d done prenatal yoga and birth preparation together. She replied to me: Welcome to the parenting conspiracy.

Welcome to the parenting conspiracy…? What did that mean?

As the weeks and months went by, Bruno and I came up with multiple interpretations. We noticed that baby Elliot was incredibly cute whenever we were with childless friends. He’d spend the entire afternoon crying, fussing, refusing to nap, and then a friend without kids would stop by and he’d start cooing and batting his eyelashes. Our friend would say: ‘Oh my God he is the cutest baby ever!’ Bruno and I would look at each other and mouth: parenting conspiracy!

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