church baby
Babies aren’t perfectly quiet, even when they sleep. I can’t figure out how to take this baby to church and not feel like I’ve sneaked in a noisy ticking time bomb. There was another baby beside us on Sunday, and together our babies disturbed the peace with tiny sounds that wouldn’t have mattered inside our house — grunts and coos and burps and farts.
When Henry lets out an explosive fart in our house — sometimes it can last five seconds, and sometimes there are several in a row, I say we can’t take him to church just yet and laugh as I picture that sound echoing in a moment of silence. But while he’s actually there in church with us, it’s not funny. Church is now organized in my mind into the parts that are loud and the parts that are quiet. I have no idea what readings occurred or which songs were song.
On our first Sunday with Henry, he fell asleep and didn’t wake for the whole service, but he grunted in his sleep at one point, the tiniest little baby grunt, and two older women whipped there heads around to see what had caused the commotion.
Last Sunday the woman with the baby beside us seemed unphased by her baby’s sounds. She had her other two young daughters with her, too, and they were no quieter — though certainly they weren’t loud. And she nursed throughout the service while I, still not graceful with nursing, had pumped, and Steve fed Henry from a plastic bottle.
NOT SIMILAC, I wanted to write in red on the bottle. STILL HAVING TROUBLE NURSING. FORGIVE ME. I have so much to learn about forgetting what others think. This baby is going to have to teach me so much about disregarding the opinions of others — as we flail our way to enlightenment in the very last pew.
