(#17/52) Us, Paris.
#35mm
One night I’ll never forget, we had a kind of sleep deprived, jet-lagged existential crisis moment. With Brigit asleep in her stroller, we roamed around the Seine by Notre Dame, lit golden and festive on a night in September, the banks filled with college age kids smoking and drinking at a clip. I recalled myself, a high schooler in France in the early 2000s for a semester, the warmth of closed circles of smoking friends, body heat and linked arms. We peaked over the stone walls down on the party, feeling like old bystanders, remembering; somehow with much less freedom as parents, but with a new sort of vision for life we’ve never had before.
Tonight, two young American parents with a baby in a stroller, we talked about everything we could do and couldn’t do and what was next and and what was new and what couldn’t wait. The priorities. The ways opportunities open life but also require ceaseless construction, sometimes reckless focus and relentless effort. The weight and blessing of responsibility. The criticism and the loss. The syndromes. The next step.
We’re still having these conversations.
Negotiating life in this era, this stage otherwise I’m particular, is difficult and confusing. We are a family. As partners, we are a relationship, kin. As individuals, we have each their own goals. Each of these positions fraught with its own weights, financial questions, is enlivened and stimulated by its own values, family ties, friendships, mentors, aims, foci. The world is not set up to let us both go as hard as we wish, even though we’d like it to be. We do a lot of “You go” and now “Your turn.” Egalitarianism is hard. It takes work. And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
So much today is elating and incredible, and then suddenly a feeling of missing something, rejection, and then renewed: lights twinkle on in some distant future, the stars are beckoning you onward.
On the surface life is a circle of beginnings middles and ends but inside a life is an endless landscape, tunnels, valleys, airports, sunrises. There’s nothing but newness sometimes, the world of parenthood, for example, a newer territory than any we’ve ever known. But we’re doing our best, which is, of course, all we’ve got.
