I have been ‘lucky’ to spend nine weeks home with Meg and babe. But why should this be luck or the grace of my employer? Why should it not be standard? ie, all parents are home for the first month or two, then they each take consecutive parental leave shifts? — The immediate counterclaim references the challenges to employers. - Which implies we value their challenges higher than those of the family and the mother. Our sympathies for employers seems misplaced.

- January 11 cont’d. 

This should perhaps be unsurprising but there’s nothing obviously “gendered” about Nelle. She’s a baby, a human, a personality-becoming-personality, a uniqueness, but is not in any meaningful sense a “girl”. It’s as though during diaper change or bath time the single source of evidentiary truth reveals itself, but otherwise does not make itself known. Yes, lots of hand-me-downs are pink. And, yes, we use feminine pronouns. But it is not clear to me what these mean, like if you were to tie a ribbon around your finger but forget to what it refers.

Nelle is drawn to tv screens, cell phones. Off, they are high contrast (often black); on, they are also high contrast, radiating light.

Oral fixation makes more sense having a baby and witnessing her sucking reflex.
And so now is screen obsession—screen fixation—a high contrast reflex? -

- January 11.

Nelle is seeming to notice more regularities—patterns or rhythms—in the world. And she herself creates them: her smile is a tendril seeking a trellis, a butterfly seeking a flower opening—a way of light seeking a pupil.

We await her giggles, her laugh — like a fish awaits the hook it knows not.

- January 10, 2020.

Nelle would not be without our tribulations, including the loss of Photon.

- December 24 cont'd.

Every so often, I look at how my life has changed, and expect to feel resentful; I am surprised to find I am not.

Barthes, in A Lover's Discourse, somewhere (p. 169 'Clouds') speaks of spurned emotions as a sign for an other; thus, any resentment would be towards or for an other—a tantrum, a lashing out. But, for the most part, this lashing does not occur.

- December 24.

I think I've started to handle the anger better. Listening to the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast on the Stoics: an emotion requires that I assent to it. For the Stoics, this is because emotions are grounded in reason. For me, it is because I can (and must) respond to my emotions. (Getting pulled into reaction is to be pulled into (the creation of) a rut.)

In Kung Fu speak, it is as though I am dying to be reborn—to resist this process will only make it difficult for me. I must accept this, my death—yet another one on this journey. My birth—yet another one on this journey. For one must constantly die to oneself to be reborn as (now) one worthy of raising another human.

(An attempted solace: babies are stimulus-impulse neuronal network beings: i.e., they have no choice/choosing faculty. But this feels like I'm abrogating/abnegating my responsibility towards this fragility by thinking it 'less than human.' Sure, she is developing and is not fully choosing, but the emphasis could rather be on her way of being — how she is — and our/my responsivity to her.)

(I get angry towards technology and the baby: the 'inert' permissibility of emotional release?)

- December 16.