No matter how small

I don't think when we look back over Little Bug's childhood that we will recall the last week as among the best.

Moving's been hard on him, full of missed naps, fussing, and not enough time with moms. It's hard to play with the baby or hold him when you need to spend every waking hour packing and then unpacking boxes and organizing the furniture. Fortunately friends and family have been amazing--friends drove the car out from Tucson to Northampton and then stayed to help; grandparents have entertained him and unpacked us. When there was no safe place to put him in the house, folks put him in the stroller and took him on walks everywhere; he's seen more of Northampton than we have, and met half the population. As my mom said, "He has such lovely manners. He greets everybody with a big smile, and does something to make them feel special."

Even so, I confess that for the first time in his life, I've found myself annoyed by him and his endless needs, his crying, his very presence. I had no empathy, no ability to distinguish between his legitimate complaints and what might be "extra" fussiness from all the upheaval. Not that the days have been without magic, laughing, or smiles over how delightful he is, but only that there have also been lows where the best we could do was make sure he was safe and fed, not necessarily appreciated or nurtured.

But Monday night, our sixth in the house, I suddenly realized we were going to be alright. Friends from here had brought us dinner, and we took a real break to share it with them and enjoy their company. Most of the random and sharp stuff was gone from the first floor, and even though there wasn't yet a safety gate on the stairs (tricky space, requires special gate--of course), after they left we set him down and let him run around for the first time.

Bug found a box where I'd been collecting a few things to take down to the cellar and gravely carried it into the living room. Then he unpacked the things in it and took them all to the kitchen. Then he went to work in the play space, carefully taking down all the big pillows against the wall and making a pile of them in the middle of the squishy letter tiles. Then, as we watched all this with growing amusement, he slowly backed up to survey his work, in such a perfect imitation of Jennifer checking out her organizational work that we were shouting with laughter.

All that time he was stuck in his play pen he was watching us. And there he was to help, if only we were open-hearted enough to appreciate his work. Somehow, I'd forgotten that he wasn't just a baby, full of needs and a bundle of work. He's a person, no matter how small (as Horton said), generous, funny, loving, trying at times, but fully a human in his own right.

Signs and Wonders

Little Bug was discharged by the cardiologist today--the hole in his heart has closed completely. Thank God.

The hole in his heart was the last trace in his body of the complete mess that was his breathing and circulation when he was born--he had PPHN, or Persistent Pulmonary Hypertension of the Newborn. When he was born, his heart and lungs didn't make the switch from fetal circulation to baby circulation; he remained a hybrid, an amphibian, not quite ready for life as a land mammal, ready to dip back into amniotic fluid and resume life as a fetus.

If it hadn't been completely terrifying, there might have been something fascinating about the coming into the world of our liminal boy, the way he walked between the worlds--of life and death, of fetus and baby. It also made me realize what an astonishing series of events take place inside a neonate's body, just as much as inside the mother's body, the switching over of heart and lungs, digestion...everything.

But then babies are always in between, in some astonishing process of becoming. They grow at a rate their first year that is scarcely human, more plant-like than mammalian, except that all mammal babies do it. Little bug's leg is about as long as his whole body was eleven months ago. The first year is a fast-forward blur of milestones, rolling over and grabbing stuff, focusing the eyes and attending to social interaction, then suddenly sitting, standing, walking, running.

The most startling to me is the leap into language. When I worked in daycare, we would watch the inevitable process by which they would start to communicate with words around 12-18 months. As the director said, it was as if your cat suddenly started to speak. Here are these little beings who go through being a jumble of incomprehensible smiles and cries to older babies who have begun to make sense of their own needs and desires and can communicate them pretty well to you. And then, suddenly, they talk; they are so much more than hungry or tired or in need of a diaper change. They are little people; unformed to say the least, in-process, but unmistakably human.

Bug has started calling me "Raura," or 'Mama Raura," or just some version of "Mom." The "Raura" startles me, because it's so nearly what everyone else calls me, a casual, friendly name. I got him up to go to the doctor this morning, woke him before he was ready, and he wailed, "Roooora!" to complain, a plaintive sound, so eerily like what any adult I know might have said in the same situation.

Aside from a few words--names for us and a word for nursing, "na-na" which he says with such deep pleasure he can't help but smile--he has some signs. Like a lot of parents of our social location, we've been teaching him a little bit of American Sign Language, because it turns out that the major obstacle to speech is what you have to do with your mouth and tongue, not what you have to do with your mind. It's still mostly the sign for "more"--more food, more tickling, more kitty, more game, more singing...always, give me more of life!--but he's added a few here and there: change my diaper, pick me up, fan. Like most babies, he loves ceiling fans; the first thing he does when we go somewhere new is scan the ceilings for fans.

They say that you need language before you can form memories, because language abstracts and symbolizes things, and you need that to store them in memory.

I also notice that these bare beginnings of language make Little Bug more self-conscious, more aware of himself as different from other people. It's a concept he's been wrestling with. I see it flash behind his eyes when I tell him to stop and he gets a wicked smile and takes off in a different direction. "See!" he seems to say. "I am my own person. I have different desires than you do!"

Recently, he saw Jennifer start to cry and he cried too. "It's okay, Bug," I said. "You're a different person than Mama Jennifer." Something about that clicked for him, and he suddenly stopped.

Language requires self-consciousness. Not only do I have different desires from you, but I understand that what I am thinking is opaque to you, and I will communicate it to you. You live in a different consciousness. Even little babies must have some understanding of our separateness, because they are so social, always trying to bridge the gap between us. But Bug at 11 months, more and more, is aware of himself.

He took this to a new level a couple of days ago. I said to Jennifer, with him sitting a few feet away, "You should get a picture of him signing 'fan'." She picked up her camera, and he posed, apparently having understood exactly what I had just said. He put his hand in the air in his sign for fan, and got a super-fake smile on his face. Jennifer snapped it, and when we saw it--the picture above--we laughed and laughed, unable to believe the evidence of our eyes, that he had the ability to pose, to act, to be false, to project an image of himself for others. He leaned in, grabbed the camera, looked at himself, and joined our laughter. He found a digital image of himself pretending to sign "fan" hilarious.

Liminal boy crossed another threshold, imagining seeing himself from outside himself. With each day, he's a little more of a person. And it happens so fast it makes my head spin.

Tool Using Bug

Last night Little Bug discovered how to really make use of the telephone.

It was after midnight when he woke up wanting to nurse. He started to fuss, but quieted when I woke up and called for Jennifer, whom I assumed was in the study. When she didn't answer, he frowned and looked like he might really holler, but I said, "Come on, let's look for her," and reached for him. He understood me better than I expected, and crawled over to be picked up. We went to Jennifer's desk, and I realized she must have gone out to copy one of the billions of documents that constitute our move, which can only be worked on in the middle of the night, when Bug is asleep. Poor Jennifer was at Kinko's, and I tried to think what I was going to do with what was soon to be one very unhappy Bug. I got him a cup of water and took him back to bed.

That's when he realized that I had failed. He screwed up his face and let loose with a heart-rending cry.

"Wait, Bug," I said, with only a slight edge of desperation in my voice. "We can call Mama Jennifer." And so I did, as he once again held his wailing in hopes I could do something useful for him. I put Jennifer on speaker phone, and we talked for a minute: she had to send a couple of faxes but would be right home after that. "Bug," I said, "do you want to talk to Mama Jennifer?"

"Hello little love,"she said.

Then Bug had his say. He let lose with the saddest, most wrenching cry ever, all the grief in the entire world compressed into one single piece of communication with his Mama J.

"I'll be right home," she told him.

Bug had mastered the use of the phone.

Not worrying

  I'm not particularly worried about Little Bug.
  This, I think, makes me strange. Strange to other parents and even to myself. When my daughter was younger, I worried non-stop about her. I still worry about her at 23, despite all my efforts to let go and let be. She seemed perpetually to demand worrying about, to the point where worrying seems intimately entwined with loving her.
  At almost-ten-months, Little Bug and his age-mates are starting to do more things: stand up, clap hands, babble, wave, maybe use some signs (for the sign-language inclined parents) or take steps. Among the folks I know, there's a constant checking, a look of worry when their child seems slower than another on these markers. I read a lot about the competitiveness that drives parents of young children (over the edge, the New York Times always seems to say, like in this article.) But mostly what I hear is worry--is this little one I adore going to be okay? Am I doing something wrong that is going to make him or her not be okay?
  Worrying about your children, a lot, from developmental milestones to car seats to bike helmets has become part of the American odyssey of parenting. This is relatively new, from I think about the 1980s, when we first passed laws mandated the latter two things. Sometimes I forget this and think Little Bug's grandparents must know how to operate a car seat, but they don't, or have only learned from their grandchildren. Jennifer and I grew up in an era more relaxed about accidents and injuries--for better and for worse--with more space to find our own adventures, less supervision, and more opportunities to try things and make mistakes.
  Writers as different as Michael Chabon and David Brooks have argued that children lose something in all this worrying. Chabon writes about the closing down of what he calls "the wilderness of childhood," kid-controlled spaces and time, and asks what happens to imagination and adventure when children are chauffeured from one adult-organized event to the next. David Brooks calls this year's graduating class part of "the most supervised generation in American history," and suggests they are not prepared for the wide-open spaces of adult possibility.
 So if it is normal for the parents I know, normal for my generation, and normal even for me, why don't I feel that familiar space of worry about Little Bug? I keep turning it over in my mind, feeling for what is absent, the way the tongue finds the space of a missing tooth. One of my theories is that it is just experience. He's my second, and I experienced first-hand the futility of all that worrying the first time around. It took all my time but didn't accomplish much. Alternately, and relatedly: I'm just too old. I can put aside parental worrying and enjoy Little Bug because he is the surprising, unlooked for child of my late forties (all right, I'm a lesbian, he's not exactly an accident. But if you'd asked me 10 or even 5 years ago, I wouldn't have predicted his presence). Somehow, this just makes him a pure gift; whatever he is, is perfect.
  On the other hand, I didn't start here. His birth was difficult, and he spent his first 11 days on a respirator, hovering between life and death. We heard a great deal about the possible consequences of the time around birth when he didn't get enough oxygen. I would look at his bright, alert eyes and think someone was definitely home, but especially those first few months, it was hard to tell how much that was true. Each new sign--the ability to hold something, to focus, to nurse, to tune in to us--was reassuring, but never quite enough. Or rather, it reassured me that he could develop that far--but how much further remained an open space of worry.
  But somewhere along the line, it feels like it was Bug himself who taught me how to hold the future more lightly. He laughs easily and often, finding joy in everything. This week, the new thing that cracks him up is something akin to conversation--he does something and we reply, or imitate him, and he dissolves into helpless giggles. Last night I was trying to amuse him with "Uh-oh" and the reply of my childhood: "Spaghetti-O." (Yes, Gil, the revolution will not be televised and I get how crassly commercial that is. But it stirred up from the depths of my unconscious and I was trying to entertain a baby in a play yard while I did the dishes, and I wasn't feeling desperately creative.) Little Bug got it right away, and while he can't say "uh-oh" he could say "uh" and I'd say "spaghetti-o" and he would laugh his head off. Or he'd make a sudden loud noise and I'd pretend to jump. Over and over and over, but each time brought peals of laughter.
  So he was quick to sit and on the early side for pulling himself up and now cruising around a room. I felt like it was part of his program of reassurance, his effort to calm neurotic fears. Just laugh, mama. I looked away from him in the shopping cart this morning to find something on the shelf and felt someone tickling my belly. Look at me! that gesture meant, but what a gentle way to say it. The more I love him, the more drawn I am into his world. He lives effortlessly in the present, having, we presume, little ability to conceptualize past or future. If my oldest is perenially anxious, a child who feels most loved when there is worry for her, Bug doesn't seem to have a lot of space or use for it. I'm not much worried about him, I think, because he doesn't really allow it.
 

 

Lady Gaga

Photo: Trixie Karinski

  I thought I was raising a jazz man. He's always been interested in Louis Armstrong's trumpet, and before he could sit up he would stop and pay attention when Hugh Masekela came round on the iPod. But I wondered today if we could have different ideas about music.
  Jennifer and I just got Lady Gaga's CD, Born This Way. We liked the drag-queen presentation, the startling aesthetics, and her voice. But when we put it on, we were unanimous. After a couple of songs, we just didn't like it that much.
  But then we looked over at Little Bug, standing in his playpen, looking adorable and a little rakish in just a T-shirt and a diaper. He was hanging on to the top of the play yard with one hand--he can't stand up on his own yet--and was listing seriously to the side, like a small drunk, resting his head against his arm, singing along with his eyes closed, at the top of his voice, "Da, da, da, da, da, da," lost and blissed out in the music.
  I thought we had a few more years before our musical tastes parted ways...

Truffle aioli

   I'm a foodie, and have the waistline to prove it. Highbrow, lowbrow, it doesn't matter--I have an adventurous palate and like to try new things. But Little Bug makes me look boring by comparison. The happiest time in my life as a cook and fan of good food has been the last three months, as Bug has discovered food. Watching him try something new for the first time is virtually cinematic--he gets a surprised look as he realizes he hasn't tasted it before, and then a frown as he concentrates on the flavor. When he was a little guy (say, two months ago) his whole body would jerk as he used his entire nervous system to register all the new parts of a taste. Now he just screws up his face, looking like you've just fed him something really foul. Then he relaxes and makes a decision about it. Sometimes it takes two or three tries before he comes to a conclusion about what he thinks. A really fine food can win drumming on the table, clapping, and a smile that lights up the room. Bad is when he pouts out his lips and rubs his face. I can watch his pure sensuous joy about food for an entire meal, sometimes realizing that I've forgotten to eat myself. He shouts and claps and gets wildly excited while we laugh.
  Tonight we went out with his godparents, and you can see from the picture what he thought about chocolate cream pie. He's got some whipped cream on his nose, and he's clowning around and grabbing the fork. I can't remember that I've ever experienced such pure joy in chocolate as he did tonight, which was I think was his first. But while pie was definitely the favorite, it certainly wasn't the only new food he expressed real appreciation for. Carmelized onions got a table bang of approval, and sweet potato fries with yogurt sauce won applause. The most exotic flavor of the evening was truffle aioli, which got serious approval. The one that surprised me the most, from earlier this week, was arugula, which is a startlingly bitter green that made him clap with delight.
  He's definitely what my mother would call a good eater, and there's a lot of comfort that comes from knowing he's breast feeding and it doesn't really matter what he eats, or doesn't, for nutrition. But still, I'm puzzled  in retrospect about most of what I read in the baby books about introducing your baby to solid foods. Brazelton tells you that they have total control of whether they will eat or not, and warns you not to get into power struggles with your baby. Really? People get into power struggles with babies? My mother's generation's Dr. Spock talks a lot about table manners. Say what? I read books about making your own that were full of carefully calibrated information about nutrition that made me anxious, and cookbooks that were very specific about when you could move from single food "meals" to mixed flavors. For the first couple of months we carefully followed the pediatrician's advice about introducing only one new food every three days so we could watch him for signs of allergies, but now he's got so many foods and no sign of allergies that we've stopped being vigilant about it. Besides, when we read Jerome Groopman's article in the New Yorker  about how allergists were no longer sure that delaying introducing certain foods to babies to prevent them from developing allergies wasn't causing the skyrocketing allergy rate, we decided we didn't know enough and stopped worrying. I'm sure there are babies that are picky about consistency, but when I read in What to Expect that you can start them on finger foods at 8 or 9 months, I was totally perplexed about the point of the baby food industry, if it's really just a matter of weeks that they need pureed foods. I ate ground food for longer when I had braces.
  I'm not sure where the sheer amount of anxiety we are being schooled to bring to feeding babies is coming from. But certain things Bug has taught me. Like that babies are astonishingly sensuous little beings, and food is fun. Especially when it's new, and you can put it in your hair.

Boy oh boy

   We went to the playground at the mall last night--a godawful, consumerist place to put a playground, I admit, but the only place to play indoors on a summer night in the desert--and I love meeting the other kids and parents. I was watching two little boys, about five or six, and liking them because they were gentle with Little Bug, sweet and friendly. Then I saw them hold hands out of their sheer enjoyment of each other, and one stroked the other gently on the arm. My heart lurched for them, as I looked around for the dad or the bigger boy who would beat them up. Nothing happened, but I learned something from my fear. Even--or I think especially--for little boys, masculinity precludes showing affection for each other. In fact, I thought as I watched them, this is why boys learn to hit each other--the only way they can legitimately touch each other is if it's shrouded in roughness.
   I find myself surprised at how much I want to shield Little Bug from the expectations of early childhood's version of masculinity. I remember the time Jennifer came home from looking all over town for a dress-up party outfit for Bug, and reported that there were endless opportunities to put him in camouflage, but almost nothing else. "Apparently little girls go to parties, and little boys go to war." I don't want him to go to war, especially not at nine months.
    One time we were talking with a developmental specialist about how our Little Bug was doing, and we told a favorite story about how he was. He was visiting his cousin, and he took his cousin's piano and investigated it fiercely--threw himself at it, flipped it over, gave it a bear hug. His cousin watched the entire proceeding with growing alarm, and finally his mom said, "Hey, little guy, do you want to show Bug how you play with it?" And his cousin crawled over, and using one finger, showed him how to plink a  key. We laughed as we told this, and the developmental specialist said, admiringly, "Yes, Little Bug is all boy." I wanted to say, as opposed to what? They're both boys, one bold, one mild in this particular interaction; the next time Little Bug is afraid, or gentle, or loving, will you say he is less a boy?
   In the rest of my life, gender has grown more complicated. Women who work out can show off their muscles (like Little Bug's tia in the picture)--female masculinity is no longer terrifying or subject to pop Freudianism, whether the women in question are lesbians or not. The men I ride bikes with worry out loud about whether they are fat. Transgender folks, especially youth, seem to challenge binary notions of gender without even fairly conventional folk getting too bent out of shape, at least in the southwestern city where we live. When I lift weights at the gym, it's still pretty much a boy space, and I get to overhear all sorts of fascinating conversations. Like the butch boy student who worried out loud to his friend about whether a young woman he met at a party had given him a wrong number on purpose or by accident, all vulnerable and hurt, and his friend asked him if had asked his mother what she thought. Some college students describe their gender as always needing enunciation ("my name is Chris and I identify as male.") Men I know embrace the concept of metrosexual, and have discovered that wearing flower prints and carrying a man-bag is a sure-fire way to pick up women.
   But in the pink and blue world of early childhood, it's still frighteningly about boys growing into the most caricatured versions of men. A whole slew of books--The Dangerous Book for Boys, Raising Cain, The Trouble with Boys--sell us a complex mixture of how young masculinity can be toxic and cruel together with an insistence that boys are completely different from girls. If I talk about how Little Bug likes to look at books again, apparently having reached an end, for now, of his perpetual motion phase, folks tell me that this is unusual for a boy. As good consumers of this literature of boyhood, we seem sold on the idea that boys can't accomplish the literary and attention-based tasks of childhood. Boys naturally play with guns (even in the historical period before there were guns? I want to ask), run wild, struggle to learn to read, and need frequent recess; girls are verbal, relational, and settle down easily. Despite all the good feminist scientific work debunking it, the difference between boys and girls turns out (surprise, surprise) to be all about brain structure.
   The thing I worry about, even beyond what we are doing to boys and girls, is that we are smuggling back into the wider culture really fixed notions of the relationship of male and female to masculinity and femininity. How, after all, are these youngsters who are so rigidly masculine or feminine supposed to grow up into the metrosexual men, the queers, the strong, jocky women, the gender-bending intellectuals and transgender folk I know as adults? When I was young (when I was a boy, as Dar Williams says in her song of that title) in the 1970s, movies and television featuring the likes of Kristy McNichols, Tatum O'Neal, and Jodie Foster, together with the flowering of a Free to Be You and Me feminism made it clear that  girls and sometimes boys fit really badly into the gendered expectations the culture had for them, and that there was something wild and fun about that. Despite the anxiety about homosexuality that lurked behind all this (remember that in Free to Be, it turns out that William wants a doll so he can be a heterosexual daddy some day), boys and girls had more space forty years ago to be complexly gendered, at least until they hit adolescence.
  I want better for Little Bug than camouflage and the expectation that he will hit people and struggle to learn to read on schedule. I want better for all our boys, and girls, than the belief that we know what's important about them from the minute we identify their genitals on an ultrasound. True story: when Jennifer got the 20-week ultrasound, the tech said: "There it is! We know the gender! He's a boy!" Jennifer replied, without missing a beat: "We know the sex. We won't know his gender for a long time." As the tech retreated into puzzled silence, I thought, yes, exactly. Let's hope gender is something he can feel safe to live out in complicated ways throughout his life.