So much time; so few entries. Every night (several times), I sit in the rocking chair with my son in my arms and write blog entries in my head, but they so rarely make it to the computer. I have great and profound things to say about the nature of motherhood, the miracle of creating a child, my subsumed identity as a non-mother person, my hopes and dreams for the future – for him, for me, for the family we are buidling… but mostly they’ll stay unsaid, and the world probably won’t be much the worse off for the loss.

So the baby turned one year old a month or so ago. I gave him his first haircut last week. I kept the fluffy discarded hair and put it in an envelope, because my mother has the product of my first haircut in an envelope stuck into my baby photo album, and I’m sentimental like that.

A friend mentioned how her mother always waxes lyrical about the day she was born on her birthday, and how she’s not really very interested. Until I was in the same position, about to give birth, I’d probably have felt the same had my mother (horror of horrors) decided to go into detail about her experiences back in 1973. The thing is, what you’ll never manage to get across to your offspring is the sheer amazingness of their existing at all – how they sprang from nothing, were produced from your loins to your total incomprehension, despite the fact that you’d been being kicked inside-out by them for months; how they are the perfect synthesis of two people who before were separate (though joined by holy matrimony, natch), how the essence of two families (alike in dignity) filtered down to compose one baby who manages to look like everyone on both sides all at once. These things, incredible and wondrous to me, will be “Well yeah, duh, biology, genetics, y’know, Mum.” to him in a few years, just when I want most badly to explain it all to him.

Oop. Time for the finale of Shear Genius. Gotta go be shallow.