Local Writers Showcase: Paul Merson

This is our weekly showcase of local writers. This week we have a lovely submission from Paul Merson. Enjoy!

My Baby’s Story by Paul Merson

It was late in the summer of 2015, one could tell things were winding down – the shimmer of the leaves, cooler evenings, shorter days.

A change of seasons is a beautiful time to be a New Yorker. Summers are notoriously hot and humid, the winter of 2015 left absolutely no doubt about the fact that I forgot all about my days growing up in Russia and playing hockey in O F weather and have grown to dislike the cold.

The cohort effect, of some of the older people moving to warmer climate was certainly affecting me. I was thinking about it a lot. The generational cohort effect in the text for this course was referring to the people born between the years of 1946-1964, but I had a few friends move to Florida, Arizona and Texas and I was experiencing something like it, perhaps something closer to age graded effects.

I will have to bring this up to a therapist or a psychology professor to find out exactly which effect I was experiencing. In any case, changes were happening around me and therefore probably to me I just didn’t realize that the biggest change was still to come, one that would have profound effects on me in every conceivable way. The summer of 2015 was unlike any other in my life, I had finally met the girl of my dreams.

She was unlike any other, not perfect but perfect for me. We met on the coldest day of the year during one of the coldest winters on record. Clutching our gym bags in nearly frost bitten hands on our way to a random bar on 8th ave. The rest was history that I will leave for another story. Fast forward 7 months, a glorious summer of love was in the books. I felt invincible, yet innocent kind of like I did when I was 21, before all the desensitizing life has done onto to me.

The study of the aging brain and neuroplasticity was what I had to thank for the feelings I was once again having. They were reciprocated. As it turned out she loved me too. To put it in the scientific terms of neuroscience our respective hippocampuses, which are parts of the limbic system were sending a lot of information to the amygdala – the almond-shaped organ of our brain that is responsible for some of our deepest emotions. Perhaps there was too much of them at some points. We were powerless against this forceful tide of emotions. With autumn now surely on the horizon I found myself walking briskly to the Rite Aid superstore that sits in the middle of Brooklyn’s China Town of Avenue U. It was time for a pregnancy test.

The love of my life, 11 years my junior was waiting nervously at “Pho” one of our favorite eateries but neither of us were particularly hungry. She grabbed the bag from me and proceeded to the ladies room, emerging 5 minutes later with tears in her eyes. That is when I knew I was going to be a dad. We both suspected this was the cause of some obvious physiological changes that my now “fiancé” was going through.

The biggest news of my life came in the form of a faintly dotted line in the middle of a plastic apparatus that reminded me of the old mercury thermometer we used in Russia. This one, of course, telling a different tale. We have created a life with which our lives will be forever intertwined with. The next few days were an emotional roller coaster filled with late night conversations fueled by our local Starbucks.

After the usual “how could THAT have created THIS” denial I began to feel the weight of this new responsibility. Almost immediately my outlook on life changed. I was a brand new person, I grew up in an instant of time. Suddenly I was more attentive, empathetic and noticing every baby and every toddler I encountered throughout the day, studying them and their boundless energy out of the corner of my eye. Seven months later the “new me” is still intact. Armed with polaroids of the sonogram kind and a whole lot of new knowledge.

I don’t know what life would have been like without this little creature growing inside of the woman that I am now proud to call my wife, or wifey on occasion. I don’t think I want to know. As the winter is melting away, new signs of life are emerging all around us. The next big change in just around the corner, we are due in late May. And everything will change again. The new me will be preempted with yet another new me.

“The only thing constant in life is change” – Hiraclitus