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.

Seven Months

You are sitting behind me, playing with wooden toys, happy as a clam after making a high pitched sonic screech all during dinner because, it turns out, you don't like carrots.

I endeavored to both encourage you to say "Mama up" if you wanted to be let out of your high chair instead of "EEEEEEEEE," and then I explained to you that if you kept up this high pitched whine approach I was going to drop you off at the abattoir. Then I enjoyed narrating your various letters home from the abattoir. "Dear Mama," you wrote. "Please don't think me ungrateful, but the abattoir is not nearly as nice as everyone says."

At seven months you are chubby! You have leg rolls, and a double chin, and you are very winning. Clothing sized for 12 month old babies is snug on you. Your hair has grown in, and your eyebrows are very expressive. You are very focused on standing up, but not able to get yourself there yet, even if you are just able to totter while holding on to your Zany Zoo. You are still on three naps a day, and each nap these days takes place in my arms. At times you conk out on my shoulder and I try, ever so softly, ever so delicately, to lower you into a pack and play in our room. The moment your back touches the surface of the pack n play your precious eyes fly open, and your mouth opens, and your objection begins to wind up. Presumably this won't always be the case, but you don't like be apart from us (me, really) when you sleep.

It's okay. I will miss it, when it ends. Whenever that may be.

You are enjoying more food, and only want to drink water from a real glass. You have no use for sippy cups, and you are over bottles it seems. In truth, you are fascinating to watch. My parents lately sent up my 1978 plastic Fisher Price whinnie horse, and you just about lost your mind with excitement, even though you can't walk or climb onto it unassisted.

Your obsession with Milo continues unabated.

I am starting to see outlines of what you will look like when you are a boy, and no longer a baby. Sometimes, when you are asleep on me (as you are for thirteen hours out of any given 24), I will thumb through pictures of when you were brand new, astonished at how long it has been since you arrived, and also at how lately you got here.

It's amusing to me that you know your name, and you know the dog's name, but not your father's name, or mine.

Today you are wearing a striped romper with a collar, which is your first collared shirt. You look very serious paging through a book about babies, and something about the collared shirt and the short sleeves makes you look older, which is a weird thing to say about a romper with snaps in the crotch and stripes and an applique of a seal playing with a big round ball.

Your mother, Succotash, is rife with nostalgia.

Mama!

Hello, my dearest decidedly non-imaginary baby, who powered through a rough last three days of Leap 5 and burst out the other side reliably sitting up without toppling over, kicking his little baby feet in his sleep, sporting a round Buddha tummy, and also - most heartwarming for me - saying "Mama." For real.

It continues unseasonably cold and rainy. I think since we fled home there have only been two days without a small craft advisory in the weather, which is neither here nor there when landbound, but I still pay attention to it. We have gotten foam baby flooring, and turned the living room into a play spot for you which you seem to enjoy. Bright colored foam blocks are both nice for teething upon and also your mother finds them relaxing to play with while hanging out with you on the floor.

I have little else to report, beyond continuing to try to expose you to other people via video chats, and there is a constant stream of laundry, and some day I really hope the painting will be done so we can begin to put the house in order. You want to stand up SO BAD. You were very angry at me today when I wouldn't let you put a used Kleenex in your mouth. It's the first time I heard a "mama!" that involved objection, if by strong implication rather than context. You have started to try to stand up in your high chair. But after several weeks of progress you have retreated from wanting to eat solids in the morning. You love nursing, but you get hungry. Like me, you often wait too long to eat, and then don't know why your stomach hurts and you are grumpy.

Your obsession with the dog continues unabated, and the dog himself has gradually begun to unbend in his attitude towards you, which I find charming. He has been observed licking you hello.

You are so big that my arms are always tired, and your dad grunts with effort picking you up.

I am supposed to be working on my book today but, as usual, I am preoccupied with you.

And that is where things stand on this, our sixth (eighth?) week of quarantine.

Oh hey!

You rolled over! From your back to your tummy! Or so your dad reports, I wasn't there to see it. But I'm told you were on the floor of the bathroom and you wanted a toy car.

Look at you, hitting milestones. Well done, baby.