Streaming from the Divine

Each time a child is born, the world is created for the first time is a thought that struck me a while ago, while looking at my newborn niece. My brother had called at about 2:00 a.m. as he and his wife set off for the hospital; I had bundled my sleeping children into the car and gone to meet them there, arriving from opposite ends of town. We were allowed to see the baby barely minutes after she was delivered, still covered with vernix caseosa and the umbilical cord clamped. My sister-in-law had been shown the baby, of course, but she hadn’t had the chance to examine every part of her yet, counting her fingers and toes to make sure they were all there. The doctor and nurses were still with her, but she anxiously shouted across to me, “Sister Kehinde, does she have lots of hair?”

Does she have lots of hair? Why would that be the most important thing you want to know about your newborn baby? I wondered, but she had just pushed a big baby out of her, and she was entitled to her anxiety and what she did with it. I reassured her that the baby had lots of hair on her head, and she lay back down.

My children suggested that she looked like one parent or the other as we stared at this new arrival from heaven.

Each time a child is born, the world is created for the first time, and it is not only because the child will come to see the world in her own unique way, which would be hers and hers only though there are zillions of people in the world, and so she would be one in a zillion, and this unique way of hers will be based on the combination of her temperament and how it will react with her environment of her home and parents first and then of her larger world, depending on where that is. But also because she has brought to this world great treasures which have never before been seen on earth, and which will never be seen again, and it is hers and hers alone, and I think that this is the question we are all called to answer.