Coping

I cannot deal with these baby gates. They require some sort of mental fortitude to install that I do not, at this precise moment, possess, even though now is the time to put them up, as I have figured out where they should go, and you are occupied with our lovely neighbor who you love, and my in-laws are not arrived yet. And yet I opened one of them, unfolded the instructions, glazed over, panicked slightly, and fled into the kitchen to eat cheese.

I have noticed, incidentally, that you also like to eat cheese when you are out of sorts or upset. Typical.

I am whiplashed by how quickly you have changed in the past week. I fear that the age of playpens was brief and undistinguished. Now you want only to stagger around, holding onto my index fingers, groaning like something out of the zombie apocalypse as you stomp your baby feet after the poor long suffering dog. He's gotten good at staying just out of reach, watchful because that's his job, to watch over us, but without being in too much danger of losing a baby fistful of orange and white fur. The other day you yanked on one of his ears like a bell pull, as if you were a Gilded Age lady impatiently summoning her maid. Your father has obtained a sort of baby sledge for you, which is mean to be pushed around with enough resistance that it should help you walk, but you are mad at it right now. You don't want to push it. You want to learn about its wheels, which means tipping it over, which means it falling on your sweet baby foot, and that was unpleasant for everyone involved. You haven't forgiven the sledge yet for its audacity.

I, too, hold grudges against inanimate objects. It's why I don't want Nana and Grandpa's dining table.

Anyhoo. The baby gates. I haven't installed them. Presumably as the cheese gradually takes hold I will feel better about them in general. They look nice, they're sturdy, they will do what I ask them to do, so all that is good. Perhaps I will be ready for them tomorrow. We shall see.

Nermal

Oh my gosh, SUCCOTASH what am I going to do with you? In three days you have gone from baby to toddler. I didn't entirely understand how quickly that would happen. You now pull up and grasp onto objects and stagger around like a little drunkard and use your hands to cruise around the room. Crawling, you have decided, is for punks and sellouts. You are so excited about walking that you cannot sleep. Last night we spent two hours trying to get you down, and then you awoke what felt like every hour or so just overwrought. Very very Nermal-like (the world's cutest kitten). Right now you are playing at the neighbors and I have to measure doorways and tops of stairs to babyproof the bejeezus out of this house immediately. Good lord.

You also have learned that dropping things from your high chair is a fun game. Our new approach is to return things to you if they fall accidentally, but not if you throw them down and then give us an impish smile. You beast.

You are particularly invested in the footposts on our new bed upstairs. They are the perfect height for you to grasp and touch and inspect. You want to be carried less and stiff-arm me into putting you down, but if I put you down in your playpen your little face crumples and then I pick you up again. Then you stiff-arm me to be put down, because it is the floor that you want. The floor! To the floor, Mama!

I have sort of stopped calling you Succotash to your face, which makes me a little sad, but you have an organic nickname that seems to suit you, and which I catch myself using naturally in a way that Succotash was not. In any case, Succotash was my imaginary baby. And you are you.

You frustrate me when you are obviously tired and refusing to nap because you want to stand on the floor and investigate the bedposts. It's a tough balance, as I have learned that baby naps are important for parents too, not just babies. But in general you are still smiley and charming and the only person I want to see at six in the morning.

Now, to order those baby gates....

Nine Months

You are upstairs playing in our new shower with your father, and I hear you making contented "oohhh wahoow wahooow" sounds all the way down three flights of stairs, so I know that I have a minute to note down your state of affairs on this, your nine month birthday, official moment in which you have been outside my body for longer than you were inside it.

You have two teeth. But you are still a huge partisan of nursing, perhaps even moreso than in your tiny infancy. The other night while reading your favorite book, when we got to the part where the pigs say "LA LA LA," you said "LA LA LA" along with us. You are tall, and you stand by yourself, and I have seen you balance briefly and pass a block from one hand to another before having to hold on again. You will walk, I think, any minute. You have been observed to crawl, but you hate it. You love Milo, and your parents, and Callie, our neighbor who now watches you sometimes while waiting for her big banking job to begin.

You are almost a little boy.

But not quite.

Snoozing

You are, at the moment, asleep on the chest of Callie, our neighbor who is home from finishing her MBA at Duke. She is supposed to be starting a high powered banking job in NYC, but instead she is at her parents' house for the pandemic. She is the eldest of three, who I somewhat tiresomely refer to as "the beautiful and accomplished Naughton girls," and all of them are home. I was surprised when she offered to come babysit for twenty dollars an hour. It will be a great anecdote, I just texted her, for him to tell when she is CFO of Barclay's.

This is the first time since we fled to Marblehead in March that you have napped anywhere other than on my body.

It feels like a huge step. Though I also miss you. So, there's that.

All right. Now I'm going to try to work for the next thirty minutes. We'll see how it goes when you wake up.

Eight Months!

You are eight months old Succotash! The dogwood is blooming in the garden, the peonies are almost up, and you have cut not one, but two tiny little teeth. I can't see them yet but I can feel them with a fingertip, and definitely when you bite down while nursing (ow! we are working on that). On your eight month birthday you also pulled to standing for the first time, on your zany zoo ridiculous activity cube thing that your indulgent mother got for you. Then yesterday, you were standing with one hand on the zany zoo and the other holding a teether. It was a rough afternoon as I think your teeth were hurting you. You wanted your teether in your other hand. You let go the zany zoo, balancing like a little drunkard, passed the teether to your right hand, and grabbed hold of the zoo again with your left without falling over. I was very impressed, and told you so.

"You're working so hard," said your mother, who wishes you to be praised for a flexible mindset in which effort is praised over innate ability.

You have wide, inquisitive brown eyes, and are babbling more in tones that border on the conversational, and are only sometimes peppered with pterodactyl screeches.

You give tight hugs and wet kisses, and I think this week you are working on going from three naps to two. Now if we could just get you to take those naps on your own, without needing to cuddle me.... but the truth is, I love holding you while you sleep. I truly love it. Some day you will drop my hand because it is embarrassing to hold hands with your mother in public. So for now, I hold you while you sleep, and point out flowers to you as they bloom, and we celebrated your eight month birthday by going up the street to Gas House Beach so you could feel the sand on your bare baby feet for the very first time. We rinsed them off in the still-cold ocean, and you didn't make a peep, but just took it all in with your wide and watchful brown eyes.

World on Fire

Well, dear Succotash, I never thought I would say "I'm glad the looters didn't hit our apartment building," but you have been born into extraordinary times. At the moment cities around the country have been convulsed in rage and protest over the death of a man, George Floyd, at the hands of Minneapolis police. That means that we are at present in the midst of a global pandemic, a global economic collapse, and a moment raising real questions about the tenuous future of American democracy. Not, in short, the world I would have wished for you. I honestly wonder what's going to happen next.

Your godless mother Ginger was protesting last night, and hightailed it away before the police took people out with billy clubs in Boston. She's tired and shaken and also thinks she shouldn't come sit in our garden until she has quarantined for another two weeks. In another time in our life, your father and I would have been with her. We are not. When I got her text I was in bed with you snoozing next to me. I then stayed awake and hypervigilant until 1 am for no reason. "Why weren't you at Selma" was a question for the 1960s. Why weren't you barricading the Brooklyn Bridge, mama and daddy? Because of you, my nonimaginary baby. I would like to have thought I was the sort of mother who would take her baby to protests. But it turns out I am the sort of woman to hightail it out of town and hide as long as it keeps her baby safe. And I'm not even all that sorry.

Maybe a little.

I love that you are wholly unaware of any of this. You smile at me in the morning the moment you wake up, a happy and safe baby who seems to be cutting his first tooth and taking it all in stride. I know your gender and your class status and your race confer privileges upon you that are substantial, and unfair, and unearned, and it will be my job to teach you humility, and empathy, and responsibility, and a sense of fairness and equanimity and justice. I know I must do that soon, immediately, or that I should have done it already. I know that the constant low-grade fear or awareness that I feel every moment for your safety would be magnified a hundredfold if you were black, or poor, or sick, and that my fear for you would make my soul constantly hurt.

Here's my hope. A lot of people of my generation naively believed that the 1960s maybe didn't sort all this stuff out, but at least got us started in the right direction. We bought into the Sesame Street ideal of celebrations of difference in which we all get be friends now. I still want that to be true. I want you to have a childhood in which race and class politics in the United States have undergone meaningful positive change. I want the world to be a more just place, within the next decade, because of a lot of brave young people taking to the streets right now.

And I want the republic to survive. If it can.

Quiet Day

Each day wears into the next, and it can sometimes feel like no time is going by, until I try to put you into the 12 month leggings and your chubby ankles stick out. I am wondering how to help you learn how to sleep alone. It's puzzling. Yesterday your father and I discussed the fact that it's possible that there is no optimal thing. That is, you had a fussy nap, and I tried putting you in your bassinet, and made it ten minutes before picking you up, and eventually you feel asleep on me as usual, and I felt certain that whatever I had done was the wrong thing, or the suboptimal thing, viz a viz helping you learn to sleep alone, or get good sleep, or whatever it is I am supposed to be doing to support your development. And it would be nice if you could nap alone, as then I could do my job, for which I will then be paid, in theory. But that means it would be more convenient *for me,* if you would sleep alone. But is it optimal for you? Maybe you, as an individual person who is also only seven months and a bit old, are at a point where, from an emotional and developmental standpoint, the optimal thing is to nap at my breast, feeling warm and safe and held and like you know exactly where I am if you need me.

I am, at this juncture, attempting to put what is optimal for you ahead of what might be optimal for me. I think that's my job. Not in a martyr sort of way, only that I've had a lot of time to be the optimal driving force in my life, and you are only a baby for a short time, and babies really can't help themselves very much. And anyway. Someday, probably sooner than I realize, you will find it embarrassing to be hugged by me. Maybe I should worry less about this, and just enjoy it.