Potential

I sat for an hour with my Nephew, Aiden, napping in my arms this evening. He stirred a couple of times, twitching in his sleep, eyes darting back and forth behind closed lids. It's my first Nephew, and it's the most exposure to a baby I've had. A few times he raised his head and muzzily looked around before flopping back down, and for being only twelve days old I'm told that's pretty good process. So what do babies dream of? If dreams are how we process the events of the days, then it makes sense that babies dream. Everything is new to them, so there's a lot to process. And being out of the womb and in the real world must be one of the most bizarre changes of scenery imaginable, if they had the experience or vocabulary to talk about it. How are they even able to dream, given that I still don't have the ability to put in words some of my dreams, and I've had thirty years of abusing the English language.

Maybe there's some sort of different level they function on, where thoughts aren't words. After all, there are so many instances in our lives where we don't need to use words to communicate: a loving glance, the memory of a smell, the brush of a hand, different colours, music, almost everything about our lives is given to communicating, and very little of it, when you stop to think, is done with words. Maybe when we're born we think in colours, and every sound we hear, unmuffled by our mother's belly for the first time, is perceived as a colour, and this gives us the ability to dream from the first breath. Or maybe it's smell. After all, smell is more linked to memory than any other sense. Maybe the connection of smell to memory is linked to how we first learnt to dream, cradled in our parents arms, associating smells with new sensations.

Either way, what to babies dream of?

Impossible question to answer, so this is what I decided, sitting back with Aiden in my arms, what I want babies to think and dream of.

There is so much potential that you hold in your arms when you cradle a baby, it's incredible. There is the potential to change the world, to impact the entire population of the planet, for good or bad. You could hold the next Leonardo Da Vinci in your arms, or the next Joseph Stalin. They might create something that it remembered for generations to come, or they might destroy what others have done. They could be remembered for generations to come, or become part of human history without impacting it in the slightest. Potential seems to me very similar to miracles. A miraculous event can be as bad as it can be good due to a series of coincidences. In the same way there's no way to measure how good or bad a child's potential is. What I like to think that a baby dreams about, in those first months of life, before language exists and there's just the senses, is their own potential. Their own potential to change the world, dreams about how they're going to accomplish those changes, and hopes for the future. Maybe in those first days, when life is a chaotic scramble and every sense is tested for the first time, those tiny eyes are flickering behind closed lids and plotting a course in life, in dreamful sleep, that is no more explainable to them as it is to us.

Whatever they are dreaming about, as Aiden's uncle I'll do my best to help him get there.

Unclehood

Sitting in McCarren Airport again, waiting for a flight to take me up to Eugene, OR, and my new Nephew. That, and the grey hairs I may or may not have found recently seem to point to my being unable to deny getting older any more. We always figured Lorna would have kids first. When she was little, she had this doll that went practically everywhere with her, even though when she got it it was almost the same size as her. And as it got taken to place after place, it started to suffer. The head developed a tendency to fall off, which was hilarious when people actually mistook it for a baby. Anyway, Lorna was always fascinated with babies, but she always seemed shy around them. Me? I guess I didn't feel either way. Somewhere there was the knowledge that I was one once, but getting older took me further and further away from nappies and prams (except for a really bizarre party we had once. . .) until they seemed irrelevant. There just wan't any point or need of babies in my life.

Until recently, when all my friends have started sprogging. The trip up to Portland last year was to meet a bunch of them. This trip is to meet one that I'm actually related to, and I couldn't tell you the last time there was one of those. Apparently my world's going to change. Apparently I'm going to want kids of my own when I meet my Nephew, Aiden. Apparently all my vacation time is going to be taken up visiting him. This is what I've been told by a few people now, and while I'll never say no way, I still doubt it.

I'm not old enough for kids. I'm still to selfish. Whether I love the little bugger or not, my next vacation is going to be a trip back to Europe. They can come visit me in Vegas, but I really have no desire to fly out to North Carolina. And the only extent that I think my world's changing is that I've got one more birthday to remember, which I've never been good at. What's one more birthday to forget each year?

And the kids of my own? Jury's still out. Jury will probably still be out until I a) die alone, b) stand there holding my firstborn, c) get killed my one of my kids so they can get their inheritance. Until I reached about 24 I was vehemently against kids of my own. Then I mellowed, due to a couple of relationships that I realized 'yes, I think this woman would make an incredible mother.' It became about someone else rather that myself. A couple of them are proving that they are incredible mothers, but not to my kids, and there's one that I shudder I even thought it.

My sister's the sort of person who'll be a great mum. She always wanted children for their sake, not hers. She didn't need children to validate herself, or to confirm her and John's marriage. And that's why I'm no interested in having children at the moment. Because there's no need for them in my life, there's no desire for them in my life. And there's actually no way for them to be in my life, cos you kinda gotta shag for that to happen.

So for now, I'll settle with being an uncle. I'm going to be an awesome uncle. Maybe not a great brother, but why change things now? I'm going to spoil the kid, take him out for his first beer, tell him stories of travelling and cruise ships and vegas, and completely and utterly fill him young, impressionable mind with all sorts of things to get up to. . .

Shit, maybe I will be spending more vacation time visiting him. All that stuff takes face time.

Uncle

It's official. I'm going to be an uncle. My sister and brother-in-law are expecting their first in about six months. And so continues the progression of generations. I've been ignoring it for the past year, even though part of the reason I went up to Portland last month was to visit friends and meet their kids. Both of my roommates from Salzburg, Ian and Clinton, had kids. Next door neighbour from Salzburg, Nate, had one. Erik, Nate's roommate, is expecting his first. It isn't like the signs haven't been there, I've just been ignoring them. Photos of me holding their sprogs aside, I can pretend that it isn't really happening, we're not really all growing up.

I have a very strange memory, and still have no idea how it works. I can forget someone's name the moment I'm introduced to them, or what I did last week. At the same time, and this is what makes it strange, I can remember things that happened to me when I was very young. And one of these memories is when my parents brought Lorna home for the first time.

It was in the first house we lived in in England. St. Paul's road. I remember being in my parents bedroom, on the bed, while mum held this tiny little person that they told me was my sister. I remember the sunlight in the room. Lorna had just come home, so she was days old, and I was three and a bit.

She'll be bringing her child home in six months. Not to any older siblings, but she'll have traded positions. She'll be holding a tiny little person, and one day that little person will be a bigger little person looking on at a new little person, and then replaying the whole thing out again. And again and again, like a line of Matryoshka dolls, leading off into the future and gods know what. Except we won't exactly be sitting inside each other.

Or maybe we are. My ancestry contributes to who I am, so it's always inside me. There's a little bit of all those relations, whether I'm conscious of it or not, sitting inside me. So each generation adds a new layer, and finally it's my turn to add something to the next Matryoshka doll layer, the outside layer. Maybe one day I'll have my own kid, but for now I'm just an uncle, and I'm almost ready for it.

Although it's probably better I stay an uncle. Gods forbid I have my own kids and subject them to mumbling rants like this one, full of mostly-remembered sentimentality and crappy metaphors. If I do, their layer of Matryoshkosity will probably end up like one of those really cheap, squashed face ones, that looks like the blind painter might have had a face explained to them once.