The doctorApril 30, 2015

Yesterday we went to see the doctor. It was just a checkup, some injections, and a measure. In some ways health care for the youngest amongst us hasn’t changed for centuries. The head is still wrapped with a tape measure, the wall has height charts stuck upon it, while younger infants lay in a a wooden box with a slider and a metal rule glued down one side, and there is a set of scales. Our doctors have a set of mechanical scales, in fact, meaning no disrespect, the stuff looks very similar to an episode of call the midwife.

We saw other parents there, saw babies at different stages, children much older, parents whose faces mirrored our own. As I picked my way through the doctors weaning hints (delivered in Serbian) it struck me afresh how timeless life is. This was a conversation that wouldn’t have changed, bar the tweaking of odd details from medical research, any country on any continent at any point in the last few hundred years could have hosted us.

We pick up threads left hanging and carry on the great tapestry. For all our grandeur and preening, all our advancement and technology, we are just weaving the smallest of threads in a picture so vast. Perhaps our job is not to ‘make a mark’ as society seems to encourage us so boldly, but to make sure the threads don’t drop. To develop the picture so it can be the truest to what this thing called ‘being human’ is, to serve the whole irrespective of time. Perhaps while we strive to be the truest to ourselves, the truest to our beliefs, and the truest to our passions we can also strive to be the best of humanity. I’d like to think that’s part of the job of parenting, and if we succeed… What a wonderful epitaph that would be.

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