Ok, so maybe I’m not going to call him The Traveler. That might have been a sun cresting dramatically over the roof tops after a sleepless night kind of moment.

But everything is like that right now. Heightened. Colors are popping. Smells. Thoughts. Feelings. And this expanding of all things is happening in exact relation to what is technically the shrinking of a day’s radius. Or rather, that would be how I used to think about it–a shrinking. What I see now is more like an intense magnification. We have zoomed all the way in. B. and I care for the babe, and we care for each other, and that saturates the frame and fills the days. I can see every pore on our boy’s nose and I am transfixed.

There is an intensely traditional pattern to our days right now.  My boobs are the source, just as my body was the source. My body needs tending, and my boobs need to give, and in order for all that to happen, I need B. to cook and to lift things and to fill my water when I’m pinned beneath the babe for hours of a day. Sometimes I envy him his freedom of movement. He had a work meeting this morning. Outside the house. He went grocery shopping. I haven’t carried cash or keys for days. And sometimes he envies me my milk; the power to soothe and calm our boy.

But biology is creating specific roles for us. I feel intensely the woman here, and he the man. The past few evenings we sat down to dinner late. Or late for us. The house was quiet. (Now that we’re playing the radio less, I notice how truly quiet our block can be.) And he’s been there without a shirt, and I’m there in some bra/shirt array, and the boy is asleep beside us in the rocker, and our conversation has turned to the work B. is going to begin looking for now that he’s on the verge of graduation. And I’m nodding going, “And then what did he say?”, and suddenly we are characters in a play set a half century ago in Brooklyn.

I don’t mind it though. Before the babe, I used to have trouble calling us adults, and certainly calling myself a woman. That is gone now. I am grown. And it feels like everything I thought it wouldn’t: powerful, sexy and exciting. There is nothing middle of the road about this. I didn’t have to fear some sitcom version of our lives. This is something else entirely.