I and Thou, Fetus
I am somewhere between a few hours and a few days of becoming a dad, and righteously becoming this blog’s eponym (my hipness, it should go without saying, is already well-established). I have never met my daughter, and I’m not embarrassed to say that I can hardly wait.
At some point over the last nine months the idea that it’s my daughter inside my wife’s burgeoning belly became very real. And I’m starting to have a very strong emotional bond to this thing. There are moments when I rest my ear on the bump and caress it, almost to provoke a reaction (from baby, not wife). I can feel her move in there, kicking and jabbing, almost in response to my stimulation. It’s transcendental, really.
But do I seriously think that Baby is aware of me? And if she is, does she at all grok who I am? And if she were, does she share those moments of transcendence? Is she self-aware? Does she wonder to herself, “Trippy… that’s my dad out there?”
To meditate over these puzzling ontological quandaries, let us delve briefly into the world of dialogical existence (No, I’m not sure either what I just wrote).