1. You will kill your baby. You will leave her in a crib, or you will sleep in the same bed with her, where she will fall victim to SIDS. You wil install the car seat incorrectly. You will keep her too hot (unless you are keeping her too cold). You will give her your viruses. Parents are all potential murderers.

The only way to prevent this from happening is to never sleep, quit your job, and not allow your child out of your embrace until she is thirty. At that point, she will be dead, so I was lying about the "prevent" thing.

2. There are at least two kinds of abstraction. I'm making this up, so bear with me. Also, my kid is crying (maybe she knows I'm killing her, but I think it's that she wants the world to contain more breasts).

Type a -- something like Jackson Pollack, or the Abstract Expressionists. You are not painting a particular thing. Or perhaps you are painting a lot of things, but they don't add up to a single subject (beyond, you know, a painting).

Type b -- the kind that interests me more at the moment -- hones in on a specific thing, and paints that. I begin, perhaps, with the box of tissues in front of me (I have a cold) (which, if my kid gets it, will kill her (so I should be washing my hands constantly (which I'm not (so long, daughter)))). Then I paint the same box 30 minutes later, the same way but with the light a little different. I am only interested in the light -- I want to focus intensely on the light, and rid my painting of distractions. So I paint less of the box, more of the interaction of box and light. I focus. I narrow. And soon, looking at the paintings, they are no longer paintings of boxes, but rather paintings of rays of light. They are abstract only by virtue of their incredible specificity.

That, to me, is the lesson of the Giorgio Morandi exhibition at the Met, which I saw before daughter was born, and thus before I could start killing her.

3. As recently as a month ago, my father (lifelong Republican), told me he thought Obama was an okay person but he'd never vote for the guy. He's changed his mind.

Dad's a weird sort of Republican -- closer to David Brooks and the ghost of William Buckley than to anybody in office now, but he's very conservative. That Obama has come to represent (for at least a small segment of Virginia voters) relative stability is I think part of the key to the reason he might win the state. For those interested in Virginia politics, the blog Bacon's Rebellion is really good (and the comments give a sense of a cross section of opinion). If you get the historical reference, you understand more about Virginia politics than the New Yorker

On a personal note, I spent half a lifetime in Virginia waiting for the state's cosmopolitan conservatives (a la my father) to win out over the reflexive South-will-rise again sorts. I'm surprised Obama is the way it might happen (Jim Webb, the junior Senator) makes much more sense to me). I'm not crazy about the candidate, but if he carries the state I'll be happy for reasons that have only a little to do with presidential politics.

Is race a part of that? Sure. I went to school with teachers who had supported Massive Resistance (the plan to shut down Virginia public schools rather than have white kids go to school with black ones). I remember vividly classroom conversations in which it was stated as fact, by white kids and black, that no black person would or could ever become president. But for me the key point is not about Obama being black. It's that a lot of people in the state (not all, maybe not even a majority, but enough to make a difference) want a country that is engaged with the world as a partner rather than imperial power. They want a president who shows greater care about the lives of U.S. soldiers. They want a government that will preserve the state's remarkable natrual heritage. And they want a state that encourages opportunity for all people. As I say, I'm sceptical that Obama will deliver them what they want, but I'm very happy that this view -- in which being Virginian means being a citizen of the world as well as the U.S. -- has real political weight.

I consider those views conservative, because they are bent on preserving a way of life in a place that I love.

Virginia is for lovers.

Your dad has an open mind, which used to be a trademark of being ...ahem....liberal. Never cared much for the word liberal as a pejorative, and I'm not sure when it got hijacked. It shouldn't be an insult.

I agree with you about World citizenship as well, and we've neglected its weight for too long.

Great post.

Thanks.

Fund your dying daughter's college education. If, per chance, she doesn't live that long, hey... new shoes.

Honestly, this needs to be read by every American. And a lot of other people, too.

Editor: Check, please.

Oh... Obama&Biden ~ 2008

Wow! A truly original post.

BTW: I love the Blue Ridge Mountains, can you see the Blue Ridge?

I remember those days - the days of heart wrenching fragility. For me they might've been mitigated by my son's colic, and the strategies I learned to calm him ("You're going to scramble his brains doing that!", my great aunt once said), but maybe not - when he was screaming, he was already broken, it seemed.

I have terrible news - it doesn't get much better. There are periods of relief (the period between rolling and climbing, for instance), but ambulation leads to bloody lips and knees, and I don't think I've ever met a child who escaped some sort of preschool head trauma (and knowing the potential consequences of such traumas rather exacerbates the panic).

My daughter is now fourteen. She has (another) boyfriend - this one with a lovely air of passivity I've decided is a definite plus in potential boyfriends. She's a petite thing, but boy, has she developed - I watch my beautiful, curvaceous, dynamic little girl walk out of the house every morning, and I cringe. She's finding her power, but the vulnerability I remember when I was afraid of "breaking the baby" is still there, under that shell of chutzpah and sparkle.

My son is twenty. He's still living at home (a scenario that seems to suit me much better than him), isn't going to school, but he's got a good job, is taking some chances socially, and is in general finding his feet. I think I might have him enrolled in the junior college next semester (and certainly next year). He towers over me. But I see that vulnerability and uncertainty, as he talks to me about friends, and girls, and what he wants. And in him too, I see the echoes of that vulnerability, under that shell of post-adolescent jocularity and his growing sense of his own competence.

Knowing things can be a terrible burden, particularly if you know something about the risks and associated consequences of childhood trauma. It exacerbates the problem posed when a parent is faced with their own child, in distress, and it falls on them to parent - to set their fears aside for a moment in favor of competently managing their child's distress. That is the great challenge of parenting - your knowledge of the microbes on your hands, and knowing that no matter how many times you wash them, that you might pass on that one fated, terrible pathogen your child's immature immune system can't manage, and it might make it's way into the fragile, elaborate system that constitutes her biological integrity. But you hold her anyway, because that's what she needs you to do.

I read your post just after I got off the phone with my mother. One of the things she said today - that her children have all proven to be better parents than she was. She was speaking in reference to my pathological brother, whose many faults have gravely undermined his paternal instincts. Yet she focuses on his good qualities nonetheless. This is my mother, who is just finishing the latest round of radiation treatments, after we discovered the cancer had metastisized to her brain (one tumor, on her occipital lobe, was the size of a golfball, and was almost certainly the culprit for her emerging language problems, and her sudden stumbles). My mother who I dare not visit, with my cold, knowing that the steroids she's taking to quell the radiation-induced inflammation in her brain have for now obliterated her immune system.

The best medical prognostications, from the people who "know" such things, scheduled her demise for a dozen years ago. Yet she continues battling along, teaching by example one lesson my brother desperately needs to learn.

Babies do break, sometimes, and sometimes there is aught we can do to prevent it. So we take what we can, on faith, and muddle our way through. Just like our parents did, and theirs, all the way down through the lineage of remarkable successes we all share, despite the odds against them, whether they were aware of them, or not.

I remember that kind of anxiety. Not that I might do something that could kill my children but just that I wouldn't be able to protect them sufficiently. My baby boy is 13 now and it seems more likely at this point that he will kill me. My baby girl is 17 and has had a steady boyfriend for a year. Now that's anxiety inducing. But I trust my kids and we have a pretty honest relationship, so on occasion I'm actually able to relax a little bit.

But even still I occasionally have the dark thoughts. I suppose I'll have them until the day I die and I (completely selfishly) hope that I won't have to deal with the kind of loss those dark thoughts represent before then.

Thanks.

especially to first time parents, thank God. I remember my brother-in-law completely freaking out when he tripped and almost dropped his first newborn, wailing that "Now she knows what fear is" (and so did he when the fall issue of Vogue came sailing straight for his head for saying something so lame.)

Mine are all having an absolute blast of high school senior year while I'm ready to strangle them over this whole goddamn college application process. We've been at it since mid-August, a total of 34 applications went out to fourteen different colleges. (Don't even try to do the math)

What a great top post & thread. Thanks everyone!

I still haven't killed my daughter, but now I have the joy of watching her kill the grandkids.

1. They're incredibly fragile, and yet surprisingly resilient to the attentions of caring parents. I expect she'll be just fine, and if you're sleeping, you're doing it wrong.

I remember hearing that girls are more likely to be born during times of stress. It was sort of an appealing handwavey evolutionary biological argument, and I have no idea if it's a well-accepted one, but I have built up some convincing anecdotal evidence.

On the plus side, my daughters are now old enough to make cookies, which they're doing now. It's all good.

2. Write down the date of the gallery. Next time you want to do something, it'll be with a thousand strings attached: sitters and schedules and worries, and the high expectations for enjoyment will threaten the actual enjoyment.

Also, I'm pretty sure everything we see is really the interaction of light with the object.

well, not much consolation maybe, but your post reminded me of this

but I laughed all through it.

I'm not sure what will happen with kid, only that no matter what, if it is bad, it will be my fault, and that there are lots of people looking to make money from the fact that they know that I know this. The knowledge of fault (not guilt, but potential guilt) is so intense -- rather like labor pains -- that it kind of shapes me despite myself. Naturally I find that annoying.