The New Normal

Elise and I had packed our bags and set them in a neat row by the door to our room. We had brought a lot, but were still leaving with much more than we had when we arrived. Mission accomplished, we were leaving with what we had come to the hospital for in the first place and now that we had him, we were anxious to leave. We had spoken to no one that morning, as I recall. Perhaps, someone--a nurse, doctor or merely the woman who wheeled in our lunch cart--had suggested the day before that today would be the day we could go home. We didn't know where we got the notion we would be allowed to leave, but there we were, ready, nonetheless. We knew. It was time to go home.

Later, we would confide in some our readiness to leave. Their eyebrows levitated off their foreheads at us, perhaps unconsciously, perhaps intentionally. "Why would you want to leave?" some would ask Elise. "Didn't they change his diapers, feed and swaddle him for you?" The answer would be a resounding no. Without going into the thousands of fascinating details of that day, basically they brought Sam into the world, gave him to Elise and I and said, in not-so-many words, "Here you go. He's your's now." And from that second, Elise and I hit the ground running, putting into practice that which we had never practiced, rehearsed or applied in real life.

Faced with any new challenge, it is not only natural, but wise and prudent to prepare. If one were to sign up for a triathlon, one would train for it, run, swim, cycle hours and miles. If you knew you had a big test on the horizon, you would study for it, right? (unless that test was AP Calculus, then you would just doodle super-heroes and dragons over the whole thing in number 2 pencil and wait anxiously for the class trip to Pizza Hut). Elise and I took classes, watched videos and read every book we could get our hands on, but often no matter how much preparation you put into a thing it can never compare to the reality. I imagine that you can float around in a NASA swimming pool in your space suit all day long, but it will never truly steel you for the wonders of space.

And when they drop your 6 lbs. 11 oz. son in your arms, you don't remember--not even for a fraction of a second--that you have never held a baby in your life.

Though we had our hands fuller than we could ever have anticipated them being, anyone who truly knows either of us, can imagine the prospect of staring at the same four walls sans Starbucks or a whiff of fresh air for the 3rd day in a row held no appeal to us whatsoever. We were ready to get back to what we had started calling 'the new normal'.

The 'new normal' would be--at the same time--nothing like the 'old normal' and exactly the same as the 'old normal'.

The 'old normal' was characterized by all things Elise and I enjoyed doing together: sharing coffee at Buckys, going for runs, bike rides and swims, grocery shopping and making dinner together, trips out west and going out for HH on Tiggy Fridays. The 'new normal' would consist of all these activities and more, only now we would have some extra company.

Imagine you are standing on one side of a disembodied doorway, and on one side of the doorway is the 'new normal' and on the other side of the doorway is the 'old normal'. To the untrained eye, the differences between these two universes would seem profound. To the uninitiated, peering through this doorway would be like Superman peering into Bizarro world, a reality where everything was upside-down, where chaos reigned and order was on permanent sabbatical. But to the experienced observer, to one who knew the difference between the 'old normal' and the 'new normal', the world on either side of that doorway would appear exactly the same. If anything, the grass was greener once we walked through that doorway, once we loaded our bags onto the cart and were wheeled through the automatic sliding glass doors into the steamy South Florida afternoon, December 27th, 2007...





And went straight home.