Galileo Moment

“It's amazing how something so small and so new can become the center of your universe so immediately. Unconditional love takes on a whole new meaning...”

My oldest daughter gave birth in late June. This quote was something she wrote on her Facebook profile last week. Suddenly, old definitions have new meanings. She’s had a Galileo moment…. she’s realized that she’s not the center of the universe; she revolves around something else.

I think this is the real reason that we have children: to knock us out of the center of our own lives. People without children have to work much harder to gain that all-important perspective that the world doesn’t revolve around them. Parenthood is a clever construct that gets parents to grow up while they think they’re raising children.

I remember when this mental shift happened to me. I was holding this very daughter. I’d had a long, difficult labor and gone gratefully to sleep while my mother and sister took the baby to hold and gloat over all night. The next morning, alone for the first time, I gazed at her serene face, breathed in her sweet smell, and felt the earth move under me, inexorably shunting me off to one side. She provided me with something more important to consider, which is the first step in “putting away childish things.”

It is a profound joy to watch one's children repeat that process, follow that same path, experience those same poignant moments. It’s what we usually mean when we say life has come “full circle.” I just never realized, when I was younger, that when people talked about life coming "full circle," the emphasis was on the FULL rather than the circle.