Anyway, the story is at turns captivating and gruesome. It is about a man with an uncanny sense of smell. He ends up in the perfume business and gets into trouble when in order to bottle the perfect scent, his methods sometimes require dabbling in homicide. Without giving away too much, as I want to encourage you to find a copy of the book and read it, the reason I'm referencing it here is because it is at its core about attempting to hold on to smells that we cannot truly create. (The movie may also be decent, but I've only seen some of it, so I can't rightly say.)
A newborn has this smell. All newborns have this innocent odor that wafts up from their skins. I've often secretly stuck my nose against the bridge of Cecily's nose or the top of her scalp and taken a mighty sniff. It's fantastic. It's one thing about babies that no one ever tells you; it exists as a small surprise present that is given to you to go along with the enormous present of having sired a child.
And it's all the more precious because it goes away. Cecily is losing it right now, as it is slowly replaced by the neutral smell of humanness and the sharper pangs of spit-up that have nestled their way into the nooks and crannies of her neck in between baths.
If anything, it's a metaphor of things to come. Babies grow up so fast, with each developmental phase being so radically different, that what's commonplace today becomes a rare sighting in a week. It tears me up inside. I want Cecily to stay a baby forever. I also desperately want her to start to smile and walk and talk and run up to me when I come into the room to give me a hug. I want everything for her (except maybe to date a ruffian) and yet I also want her to stay exactly how she is.
Raising kids isn't actually that hard. It's the watching them grow up that's impossible.
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