Oh, it IS a baby!

The oldest month of posts showing on my site as I start this post are from when I was born. First image: a tiny, round-faced human, sort of identifiable as me but I bet I’d have trouble picking it out of a line-up of similar babies. Strange to know what you looked like the day you were born.

Pictures of my young mother in hospital holding me. Her hair in a sort of bonnet to keep it out of her way, gazing down at the bundle in her arms. There is a giant bouquet of roses on the table beside her.

From the next day, my mother—and oh how her face in this picture is like the one I saw in the mirror at that age—seated in a chair and wearing a very big loose robe, gazing up at her mother, dressed for summer in a flowered, sleeveless shirt, a handbag on her arm. My grandmother is saying something; perhaps advice to a new parent.

A washed out picture of a baby in a diaper in a hospital bassinet, labeled with the name I was given at birth, but which was quickly displaced by “Dinah” (to which I legally changed my name at age 18).

I was assigned the sex “Female” at birth—it’s worked out fine, but seems over hasty to me from the perspective of 2019—and I was 6 pounds 10 ounces. This document has my little footprints. I am a hominid, all right. I theorize that they did the left foot first and I did not approve, so the right foot is all pressed down and the toes are curled.

Sometime late that month I was at home in a little white crib, in a room with blue light. I was a reasonably cute baby. I shared this picture on Flickr and my mother told a story of how they put together the crib wrong and the bottom fell out and I rolled out. No harm done except to cause some new mother panic.

There is a series of pictures of me being presented to my great-grandmother a week or two later. My mother is wearing a dark plaid dress, my father a light blue plaid shirt, rather rumpled. Neither looks well-rested. My mother’s father’s mother is wearing pearls and a neat little white short sleeve dress with a round white collar with a black bow on the front. The dress has a pattern of vertical stripes of patterns of something small, perhaps flowers. Narrow strip of white, double wide strip of pattern, and so on. I am wearing a swaddling cloth sort of arrangement and demonstrating my ability to stick out my tongue—blep—while clinging to someone’s fingers with my tiny right hand.

One of the pictures shows my terribly young father bemused as I apparently refuse to let go of his finger and my mother gazing adoringly at him as he gazes at me. For an unplanned adventure, they did pretty well with me.

Oh my goodness. I wonder if the little saucepan in this next picture of my mother’s mother holding me in the kitchen is the one I just put into the Goodwill box yesterday for Discardia. I think not, but it certainly could be. I am staring over her shoulder right into the camera, though I don’t know enough about babies to know if I’d even be able to focus on anything farther away than a face right over me at 10 days old.

None of these pictures fill me with a desire to have children or any regret that I chose not to. I’m very grateful for the life, to be sure, but I have ducked any sense of responsibility to carry on the genetic pattern.

And that’s probably a good thing. Humankind can do with a good deal less multiplying. Most of our challenges will be easier to solve with fewer of us. What an interesting world that will be. Makes me want to stick around another century, if I’m not in too much pain.

Thinking of the far future, I am smiling as I close the door and mark these posts private to cast the past into quiet darkness. Like putting the lid on a box, setting it in the back of a drawer, and closing the drawer, then walking off whistling.