"Treasure every minute"
What parent of a newborn has not had that said to them by a veteran parent (definition - anyone with a child one day older than your own). And what newborn parent has not muttered to themselves 'Are you kidding! What am I supposed to treasure? The shit, the screaming, the sleeplessness, the sorry mess that was once my home?' And always it's coupled with the insane warning:
"It goes so fast"
And you think it really, really doesn't. No time passes more slowly than new baby time, not waiting for Father Christmas to come down the chimney time, not waiting for your boyfriend of 2 years to propose time, not waiting for a part-suspended District Line train when you're late for work time.
But it is true and you will not find out it is true until it is almost too late. When your baby turns 1 you will notice by degrees, day by day, they cast off their baby form and become a child: limbs lengthen, cheeks recede and random gibberish coalesces into words.
Milestones that were so long wished for suddenly start flashing past like a glorious panorama from a train window that you can scarcely register before you're hurtled down the track. For the first time in your life you understand how some women can become addicted to having babies in a Sisyphean quest to preserve a state of total dependency.
Babies exist in a state of pure emotion and the expression of their feelings is unmediated by any experience, any learning and any intellectual process. Their anguish is expressed without restraint but so, wonderfully, is their happiness and the purity of a baby's laughter is the best curative the world can offer to the cynic and the careworn.
If you are not in touch with your emotions or find open display of emotion discomforting the early months of parenting may prove to be a trying experience but you will never receive a better schooling that a life lived in our heads alone is a life only partly lived. There is in all of us an inner child that is often silenced or banished into long forgotten exile but it is astonishing to notice how swiftly a baby's gurgles can coax that child from the shadows and into the sun where it belongs.
As I watch wistfully the last grains of sand slip from my baby's hourglass I'm treasuring every minute because it goes so fast.
