The ghost umbilical cord

Oh Mr. Gibbons, sweet baby boy, where have these six months gone? They say there is a kind of ghost umbilical cord that connect birth moms and babes outside the womb, which gets stretched thinner and thinner until… Of course we will always be connected: you, flesh of my flesh, me, your first home. I will never stop being your parent, though that is true of your big brother Ben as well. It is something else this biology piece though, since my body still feeds you (less and less now that there are peaches, and avocado and rice and…), my cells still orient towards you like a sunflower to the sun, aware of your smallest peep across a busy party with friends or from the deepest depths of sleep. Since before you were even conceived I have been letting you go though, letting you be who you are, a person wholly your own, in my care but not “mine”. That is the hardest part, since you still feel so much a part of me. The part of the ghost cord attached to my guts aches from being tugged these days, seeing you juice a wedge of honeycrisp apple with your mighty gums, knowing you are watching the world more keenly, studying how legs and lips work, frustrated in your attempts to copy, glorious in your achievements with sitting and rolling and holding on. Your eyes are so open. You are ready to make the acquaintance of the world, eager to reach out and connect, happy to bask in the joy you spread as you face mirrors its smiles and laughter. You’re an everyday miracle, the beauty of Life’s intelligence. Everything you do marvels me, however mundane. Much as I aspire to foster your independence and applaud your every advance, I take secret comfort in the way you look at me when we’ve been apart, in how you wrap yourself around me when nursing. I am so proud of how hard you are trying and of how satisfying the world seems to you. In a week we will be helmeting you 23hrs a day to help reshape your noggin. Poor sweet darling, I apologize in advance. In the meantime, you may have noticed, I cannot stop stroking the soft skin and hair of your head. My little monkey baby, clinging on yet swinging ahead. Your big blue eyes taking the world by storm.

E

p.s. I was calling you Mr. Gibbons before I remembered that is a kind of monkey with lovely big eyes....

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 

A brother for Ben

Yes folks, we know. And now you know! A baby boy is growing and moving and dancing a lively jig against my bowels. The ultrasound was last week and he looks good to our untrained eye, no extra limbs or anything, lots of spunk. He may, we think, even have been sucking his thumb, which we desperately tried and failed to convince Ben was a suitable form of self-soothing. He was a true “need-to-suck” baby, and is still pretty orally fixated. But no thumb! He thankfully seems to be, at 21 months, finally moving away from putting everything he picks up on the ground into his gullet! Of course now that I’ve written that, he might take a sudden fancy to those yummy looking cigarette butts everywhere.

Holy! A boy, another boy. The grandparents are verklempt (choked up), since knowing the sex is making it so much more real for them. A boy! I worry on the one hand that being of the same sex, but sharing only half their genes, the brothers will compare themselves more directly (think body size; chance of balding!). Perhaps it will be the opposite! I am sure temperament has more to do with it than genes anyway, since brothers take all forms and relate in all kinds of way. I have a brother, so I don’t know much about bro-bro relations, nor does A. Everyone says it’s so good for a boy to have a brother to play with. Who knows? My brother liked to play my games but he was also smaller and I was bossy! We think Ben’ll make a great big brother! He is a fairly cautious kid, and seems to genuinely care when his friends are sad. The Sanskrit name he was given is even Balarama who is the wonderful big bro to Krishna.

Anyway, after a moment of feeling the loss of a potential daughter, since two kids is probably it for now or ever, I have launched into the happy/crazy world of boy names. Wow, is it ever harder to name a boy. You can really get away with more for girls, and the options are so much vaster. We still have a few girl names, since my parents were told I was a boy. But this wee baby’s, um, boy parts were pretty clear! A boy. Wow. This is really happening…

E