Warm Bodies

Well it’s a stinker in Eastern Ontario this week. Daniel’s sweaty baby body, newly risen from his bassinet, is lying beside me in bed, our new morning ritual. Not the sweaty part, though he often wakes up pretty warm from his sleepy cocoon. It is delicious to feel our skins touch, to snuggle and lock eyes and pretend, truthfully, that all is well in the world. That I did not just sleep train him, a success fed through tears and determination. I am still heartsore, but proud of us both. I know it never ends, but Mr. D, you know you can do it now! And, of course, so do I. Other than typing this, we are luxuriating in this precious, decadent moment out of time before the galumphing ball of big brotherly love soon comes tumbling into our room. Ben has been melting us all by saying “I love Daniel” a lot these days. He is rather physically demonstrative with his bro, mostly sweetly with hugs and kisses, sometimes roughly, even pinching him or pulling that fetching tuft of hair atop his baby head (it is temptingly long…). We scold him, but it won’t be long before they will be tumbling together, learning each other’s boundaries, learning how to be brothers and friends with all that entails (on hopefully a more level ground!).

Speaking of warm bodies, I have been lately reading the book with that title by Isaac Marion. We saw the film too. You know, the age-old story of beauty and the beast, a young Zombie man who falls for a pretty Living woman, set in a post-apocalyptic world about to be transformed by love. Sounds hokey, but truly it is a lovely book. Not in the banal, saccharine use of the word. For a book in the horror genre, where half the characters are walking corpses, it is lovely. Marion writes with a poetic hand. I just read a section where “R”, the paramour, is eating his new love’s ex-boyfriend’s brain (bare with me!) and relives the boyfriend’s memory of being born. In my hormonal state, and because it is beautiful, it has stayed with me, the baby’s first impression of “Her”, the soft goddess, enormous, whose voice he heard trembling through the walls all that time. See? Lovely. And these days I can just relate well to zombies as I knock into everything from being tired, grunt a lot, you know. Daniel, vibrantly alive, grunts back, his baby way of saying, “Hey Mama Bear, I want to eat your nose”, or “curry colored poop is running up the back of this charming outfit you chose” or “how about you stop typing in bed and eat MY nose!” Go for it, sweet baby D, just not in the zombie way, k?

E

Good children

For reasons unknown to me, and perhaps surprising to those who know me as an optimist, I have been really drawn to post-apocalyptic fiction of late. I just finished, All Good Children by Catherine Austen, which details an American town some time hence built and run by a chemical company. They opt to drug all the school aged children and teens to make them well behaved and essentially mindless. It was a good read, chilling, sometimes funny, and its “hero” manages to avoid the “vaccination”. A key quote from it, which resonates for me in my darker sleep training moments, is “Living with hope is like rubbing up against a cheese grater. It keeps taking slices off you until there's so little left, you just crumble.” The book made me think a lot about how much we all claim to want “good” children, good sleepers, good students, and how much we complain about misbehaviour. The book’s simple message is that we are richer and happier when we freely feel the full range of human emotion and maintain our capacity for critical thought and rebellion. I am sure we all agree. I challenge myself to remember this and bring the fullness of what it means into my parenting. Ben and his soon to be little brother will and should test us, test themselves, create (however messy), even destroy, complain, exclaim, protest. They must be given the freedom to fail, to fall, to break. We cannot save them from everything, nor I think, should we. I know A and I are blessed with the sweetest little boy, a sensitive spirit whom we are going to yearn to shelter. Though he has his challenging moments more and more, as a thoughtful two year old on a mission, we daily come back to the simple beauty of him. To our deep gratitude to him and for him. I cherish each morning of snuggles, each dance party to Indian beats, each carrot-ginger muffin making session, every one of his fabulous new expressions (snow tractor coming!). I love what a goof he can be too, like how he was romping around wearing A’s padded bra swimming suit this morning!

Ben, forgive us this impending massive change in your life. Remember that you are our Benni forever, the one and only, our first. And not only do we love you, but we really LIKE you. Be brave, be strong, and remember that we know it won’t always be easy to share us, to be the big brother. “I love you forever, I like you for always, for as long as I am living, my baby you’ll be” (Munsch).

E