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.