“A new normal”

There’s nothing that shows the passing of time quite like a baby.

In the past 15 weeks – the entirety of Ruby’s life – she has almost doubled her birth weight. In the past seven weeks since life radically changed for us in the UK, she has grown a mini mullet, started smiling, watching things intently, grasping, blowing bubbles and attempting to communicate with a variety of sounds other than cries. She’s learnt to love a bath and to kick herself away from us when we change her. She will deploy all manner of tactics to stop herself falling asleep and starts doing so as soon as she suspects our aim is to send her to sleep. She’s becoming a little person, with her own preferences and ideas about how she wants things to go.

And like so many other parents with young children (and I imagine these considerable changes continue at pace as the weeks pass into months and years), it’s bittersweet for us. Watching Ruby develop and change and learn new skills is a joy; observing these without grandparents, aunts and uncles and friends to witness it too feels deeply unfair. Like all proud parents, we want to share her. Like all doting grandparents, our parents want to be around her. They want all the things we cannot have right now – the cuddles and kisses and face to face interaction that is central to our existence as social creatures.

I’m aware that these weeks and months will pass, and also that I can’t wish them away because they will hold precious moments with our baby. I can’t do her the disservice of wanting to fast forward time until we can all be together again. And when time does pass and we can be, Ruby will be even more fun, more capable, more interesting and interested. That’s who everyone will re-meet. But the intervening sacrifice is significant, for everybody around the world making it right now. It makes life and what’s important very simple when all it boils down to is when can I see you again? And I’m not talking about seeing each other at a two metre distance, I mean exercising our basic right to necessary human contact with those we love.

Right now, it doesn’t provide much comfort to fixate on when this will happen. The when is elusive and, as with much else, “conditional”. It is seemingly dependent on our collective ability to continue to make relatively short term but incredibly significant sacrifices. It’s important to recognise that these sacrifices, in the moment, feel anything other than short term. They span a passage of time reflected in our daughters now very chubby cheeks and super alert eyes.

While we are lucky to have access to technology that enables us to document and share Ruby’s developments, it’s inability to come anywhere close to substituting time spent with her in person is obvious. Not least because of her complete confusion as to what on earth is happening when we hold a phone in front of her face (long may that screen ambivalence continue!).

So I hope, when we finally begin our new normal, we will all do so with a clearer understanding of the limitations of our phones. That we will deprioritise our devices. That we will present in a way many of us might not have been before, or at least not in the two decades since technology gained such prevalence in our first world existence. Maybe we didn’t fully appreciate the real value of spending proper time together until it was swiftly taken from us. So I’ve no doubt there is indeed a new normal coming, one in which we may be inclined to strive a little less and be present a little more. Where we will more readily embrace all those small moments of human interaction that comprise our real offline lives, simply because we now know how bland life is without them.