Caroline Horton
English Protestant upbringing, currently has a baby.
I think God is an energy. It’s the energy of the universe. It’s love and light, it’s in everything and everyone. My sense of it changed when I had my daughter because she felt like a gift from God. Then it really became clear for me that God was love, light and energy. And she was a little ball of this. Her birth was a miracle, because babies come from somewhere, they don’t just appear from nothing.
They must be formed from energy or something. It was like the Creation, literally. God is creation, and we also create. We keep creating with babies, going back to that initial energy each time. I do believe that you can’t destroy energy, it just keeps re-forming. I’m not sure about re-incarnation, though. Intellectually I like it, but it’s a bit beyond what I can grasp. Maybe my energy is what continues.
My family wasn’t very religious. I went to the Protestant Church of England for schools and festivals, like Christmas and harvest festivals. We had religious studies at school. It was very dull, very uninteresting, very…putrid. They would tell me, “You be a good girl or Jesus won’t love you!” So of course, I wasn’t a good girl. But you know, I had a really good time.
Loretta went to get her first checkup. I had suspected she was pregnant for a while. She showed all the usual signs: nausea on seeing me, bipolar behavior, schizophrenia, and outbursts of rage… ok maybe I’m being a little insensitive.
The doctors confirmed it, with a twist: not only is she pregnant, she has been inseminated by aliens.
But after doing some research apparently they all look like aliens at this stage. I think I can see a tail. I definitely see gills.
And he’s a boy! Look for the arrow: penis.
He’s 16 weeks old, due mid June.
I always knew my first would be a girl and my second a boy. Loretta pointed out that I had a 50% chance of guessing right, but that is irrelevant. I always knew. There are some things you just know.
Here is a great rendition of the Beatles song “Hey Jude” by a little boy still in his diapers. Great talent!
I personally think child prodigies are risky business. People called me a genius when I was a kid and all it did was make me do grown up things when I was a kid. Big deal.
The presumption was that when I grew up I would advance even more into some mega genius. But that didn’t happen. And to make things worse, now that I’m grown up I spend a lot of time doing kids things. And that is not considered cute at all, especially when it is your girlfriend asking you to “grow up!”.
The moral of the story is that there is a time for everything. Let a kid be a kid and they will learn this. When they grow up they will be very good grown ups, not confused people trying to be something they are not.
That is why I clap with joy when my four year old brushes her hair. That for me is the height of my expectations from her.
This is not to say I treat her like a dumb version of a grown up. She is amazingly intelligent. I treat her like I treat my web designers who don’t speak English very well.
They are very educated, smart people who know more about certain things than I do, including their own language(s). I tone my English down with them, not in a condescending way but so communication is maximized.
I think a name can be give or take power from a person. For example, if you called a child “Idiot” as their name it would probably cause problems for them. All names cary some sort of influence for the child.
We got Cazimirs name through a series of steps:
1. Loretta dreamt that his name was “like Kashmir but different”.
2. Loretta’s mother pointed out that the Patron Saint of Lithuania is Casimir (Lithuanian is their heritage).
Once we settled on Casimir we debated whether to spell it with a z or s: Cazimir or Casimir.
Online searches revealed a Polish Church in Baltimore (my mother’s city of birth! Good sign!) called the “Faith Community of St. Casimir”. It is a Catholic Church run by Franciscan Friars, a group of people I like.
The web site has all sorts of cool things like this photo:
I find this man’s face very endearing.
The site also has a lot of cool quotes like this Prayer For Peace by St. Francis of Assisi:
Woa, lighten up, dude. That’s where me and Catholicism part ways. This is not the kind of energy I like. But I love the name. So we decided to spell it “CAZIMIR” with a Z. The Z is our way of giving Cazimir the freedom to be all the good things that history has imbued in his name while making him unique and individual, free to forge his own path as well. Every time I call his name I will have that meaning in the call. Being treated in that way he will know those options. It will influence him. How much only God knows.
