Today you are ten days old. You are wrapped in a flannel receiving blanket, snuggled into a boppy pillow between us. Your father is watching football and baseball (he says the Twins are finished for the year and that he's refusing to root for the Vikings). We took you to church this morning and you slept through the entire experience: hymns, sermon, communion, prayers, well wishes, walk home. The Gospel reading was from Mark. The one where Jesus keeps asking the disciples: "Who do you think I am?" And I can't help wondering how much of who WE think you are will affect who you become. A book review in Newsweek this week entitled "Pink Brain, Blue Brain" argued that the majority of gender differences are rooted in nurture rather than nature. Adults were put through a series of tests, told that newborn girls were boys and vice versa. The way the adults interacted with and perceived the babies was entirely different based on the gender of the child (or the assumed gender of the child). Do I speak to you more softly than I would if you were a boy? Do I swaddle you more gently? Grandma Ricki bought tiny headbands with bows affixed and we giggled as we wrapped them around your head yesterday. Are you absorbing these silly gender stereotypes already?
Joy, Grete's aunt, wrote a Charles Dickens quote in a card for you: "It is no small thing when those who are so fresh from God love us." You are so tiny and so perfect but I do not know who you are yet. I hope that my thoughts and desires for who I want you to be do not get in the way of you becoming the person that you are meant to be. For now, I think who you are is fresh from God. Every day you open your eyes and you come a little nearer to us. For now, I am simply glad that you are.
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