guard duty |
[posted by bkmarcus] |
It's about 3 in the morning and I'm on guard duty in the nursery.
Benjamin is perfectly healthy; there's no reason to worry; we're just acting out our roles as new first-time parents, starting at every sound or lack of sound, needing to see him fidget in his sleep to reassure ourselves that all is well with our beautiful baby boy.
The nightwatch takes me back 19 years to the several months I lived on a kibbutz (Zionist commune) in Israel. As the kibbutzim move away from their socialist roots, family arrangements are becoming more "traditional" -- meaning the bourgeois nuclear family in shared quarters -- but in Kibbutz Givat Oz in 1987, all the kibbutznik babies were housed communally in the beit tinokot (literally, the "house of babies").
I had a surreal semi-date in the beit tinokot with a petite chemist, who, having done the standard mandatory military service, looked completely comfortable with her hand-held radio monitor to one side of her and her Uzi submachine gun to the other. When I expressed surprise that she was so well armed in the house of babies, she looked at me like I was crazy. This is guard duty, she said. These babies are our most valued treasures.
I'm not armed at the moment, and my surroundings would be better represented in marine-themed naïve art than in socialist realism, but guard duty has me more in touch with that most-valued-treasures mandate than I possibly could have been any time earlier.
Here's what my little treasure looks like from where I'm stationed:
Benjamin is perfectly healthy; there's no reason to worry; we're just acting out our roles as new first-time parents, starting at every sound or lack of sound, needing to see him fidget in his sleep to reassure ourselves that all is well with our beautiful baby boy.
The nightwatch takes me back 19 years to the several months I lived on a kibbutz (Zionist commune) in Israel. As the kibbutzim move away from their socialist roots, family arrangements are becoming more "traditional" -- meaning the bourgeois nuclear family in shared quarters -- but in Kibbutz Givat Oz in 1987, all the kibbutznik babies were housed communally in the beit tinokot (literally, the "house of babies").
I had a surreal semi-date in the beit tinokot with a petite chemist, who, having done the standard mandatory military service, looked completely comfortable with her hand-held radio monitor to one side of her and her Uzi submachine gun to the other. When I expressed surprise that she was so well armed in the house of babies, she looked at me like I was crazy. This is guard duty, she said. These babies are our most valued treasures.
I'm not armed at the moment, and my surroundings would be better represented in marine-themed naïve art than in socialist realism, but guard duty has me more in touch with that most-valued-treasures mandate than I possibly could have been any time earlier.
Here's what my little treasure looks like from where I'm stationed:
- papa
posted by bkmarcus
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