The Little Prince

I remember reading the queer experience of the little prince seeing a lamplighter putting out the street lamp, followed by lighting it again. And then another morning, with the lamp extinguished again. Over a hundred thousand times. I remember it as a back-and-forth between the lamplighter and the little prince's fondness for his own rose. Antoine de Saint Exupéry's story helps me understand what the little prince describes as "the rose that belongs to me."

"Because she is my rose," said the little prince. "In herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses."

This passage moves me every time I read it. This is even more so after having a new baby. Now she has my full attention; it is she that I have changed nappies; it is she that I have bought truckloads of outfits and nightclothes. Just as the little prince cherishes his own rose, I'm simply enthusiastic with mine although an ordinary passerby would think that my baby looks like the hundreds of other babies.

It's an idea that cries out for individual experience. It appeals not to the gardeners' teaching of how to water roses, but to your own way of watering. We learned the bell curve and growth chart, but I have to look after my baby in her own manner. Never mind that mine hasn't gained much weight after birth. Nobody is to classify my baby as "failure to thrive." And let's face it, we don't want to classify ourselves as a failure. Who does? Countless times my wife and I have to decide if our baby gets enough breast milk. Sh-h-h, we fix our eyes on the clock and keep track of how many minutes (if not seconds) our baby suckles. From the moment we brought our baby home from the hospital, everything changed. Taking care of our own baby is, after all, a learn-by-doing, seat-of-the-pants, unique and individual project. To make life simple, we need our own way of doing it. Right now, for example, we've thrown away the notepad for scoring the start and end times of each feeding. Every time our baby girl starts her meal, I play a new CD. Instead of counting as the clock ticks, we learn to count the number of songs. It works – and definitely for our little princess.