First Day Best Day

It is without doubt your biggest day ever. And you don’t remember a single second of it. No, you weren’t blackout drunk. You were freshly hatched.

That’s why you have no memory of Day One on the Job of Being Alive on Planet Earth: your brain wasn’t developed enough to form memories.

So it’s fun, all these years later, to fill in that blank opening page of the diary, the record of what was surely the most gobsmackingly intense day of our entire life – because everything, but everything, was brand new.

What got me thinking about this is a podcast called Second Opinion with Dr. Dua.

Dua Hassan is a physician at Boston Children’s Hospital, and her podcast is dedicated to explaining the Whys of the medical interventions that babies and children receive in hospital (but that busy doctors rarely have time to fully explain to the family). The whole first season is dedicated to “the first 24 hours.”

So, with the help of Dr. Dua (and a few others), here’s a reconstruction of the way Day One might have gone down for you and me…

*

Turns out the light at the end of the tunnel is not a train, but it might as well be for the sudden sensory wallop you get after all those lovely months in the warm and briny depths.

For nine months your brain’s been building itself at the rate of a hotel going up in Vegas. (Making two million new neural connections a second those last few weeks.) So you’ve got enough bandwidth now to at least, you know, enjoy the movie. William James speculated that newborns live a life of “blooming, buzzing confusion,” but that’s probably not true. “This is a good description of the parent’s life at that point, not the infant’s,” the psychologist David Gray points out.

Geez Louise it’s bright in here. And blurry. If you could talk, you’d be hollering “Focus!” up at the projection booth. The only crisp edges are eight or ten inches in front of you your face (where, conveniently, a boob is going to swim into view momentarily). Hearing’s a little woolly – there’s fluid in your ears. And your lungs! Someone has disconnected your oxygen tube; breathing’s up to you now. A guy in scrubs is suctioning goo out your lungs to make that easier. They’re giving you something called the Apgar test.

How rude is that? You’re only a couple of minutes on the scene and already you’re getting snap quizzes! This one you’re allowed to cry in; in fact, it’s encouraged.

And now they’re pricking your heel – twice! And glooping some ointment in your eyes. Oh, man. This may be for your own good, like they’re implying. But did anyone ask you? Is this the way it’s going to go, now, forever and ever?

Actually, you probably don’t have any thoughts this complex. But you’re definitely feeling things. Like air on your skin, hunger in your belly. (Your first experience of something that’s definitely going to go on forever and ever. As Toynbee said after he converted to Buddhism: life is just one damn craving after another.)

It occurs to you: It’s gotta be just about time to meet my maker.

There’s a parable that’s been bouncing around the Internet:

Couple of twins in the womb. One says to the other, “Do you think there’s life after we’re born?”

“Nah. What evidence do you have for that?”

“No evidence, more of a … feeling. Also, haven’t you noticed? We seem to be developing some things that are of no use to us in this place – like a mouth. Legs. Fingers and toes. Feels like we might be getting primed for work on another jobsite. And a new boss: Mother.”

“Wait … You believe in Mother? Again I say: Where’s yer evidence?”

“Again I say: Can’t you feel her? She’s all around us. Sometimes I swear I can hear her voice.”

And Holy Hannah there she is. Looking like an angel … that just went ten rounds with the devil. They plop the two of you together, skin to skin. Good to meetcha. Now what’s a baby gotta do to get a drink around here?

You latch. What’s on tap is not milk – not yet. But the colostrum’s flowing, frothy as a frappuccino and rich enough to count as a meal. Luckily, your stomach is only the size of a walnut. Presently, you are full.

High-event first hour! No wonder you’re getting drowsy. Maybe just a little snooze before rejoining the fun in this place that, I’ve gotta say, looks like a promising patch to stake a claim….

*

Imagine if we could live even a tiny portion of any day as wide-open receptive, as voraciously in it as we were on opening day at the fair. Would it blow our minds in a good way? Or be so overwhelming we’d immediately have to throw an electronic or pharmaceutical blanket over it?

(photo: Alexander Grey / Unsplash)