Living Out Loud (16 page)

Times have not changed. For weeks, my son and I walked home from school and discussed the new song about the five little snowmen, the alphabet puzzle, the balance bar in the gym. Then, all at once, feeling his strength, knowing that he was beginning to achieve separation, he shut down on me.

“What did you do in school today?” “I can’t tell you.” At least that is an improvement over “nothing” and its undertones of teachers whiling away the day drinking coffee and reading magazines. “It is my privacy,” Quin finally said, hoisting me on my own petard. Privacy is a big word in our house now that I have taught it to my children. The little one has just learned to say it. When you are in the bathroom, he enters and loudly intones “privacy.” Then he hangs around, showing that he has gained mimickry but not comprehension.

The older one has not yet invoked the privacy privilege about his room, just the bottom bunk. This is what he has in it: three triangular wooden blocks, an Etch-A-Sketch, a copy of
Babar and His Children
and one of
Mother Goose
, two empty coffee cans, the raggedy red-and-white clown that is his comfort object, a stuffed version of Max in his wolf suit from
Where the Wild Things Are
, three small pillows, a down comforter,
and a wire whisk that is well on its way to replacing the clown for reasons I cannot divine. (In the middle of all this, there is usually a little oval empty spot reserved for sleeping.) The last time I changed the sheets he went berserk. “You touched my stuff,” he keened, and while my mouth said, “Don’t be silly,” my brain traveled back to the time my mother cleaned my closet. “You invaded my privacy,” I said, eleven years old and disdainful, which is probably redundant.

This is the point, isn’t it? I learned at least one thing from the New Testament—that mothers have children to sacrifice them for the greater good. It turns out that this is true, and that the greater good is their independence. But between A and Z lies a minefield of MMMM’s. First there is the shock of distance, of realizing that life continues, even when there is no mother to observe it. Later comes the contempt. I remember it well, thinking that needing my parents was a pathetic emotional rag left over from my baby clothes.

When does understanding emerge? I suppose it’s different for each of us. The cord lay slack when I was a child; it twisted and pulled and occasionally broke later, when I was running in another direction. Now it is a nice straight line. It would be too much to say that my father and I are living parallel lives, but we are both going the same way. I have my secret life and he has his. Both of us know they are not so wonderful that we have to surround them with so much psychic barbed wire. And now we each know how to back off.

I must nonetheless learn this all over again, now that I must back off in a different direction. My children and I are not going the same way. I know that is necessary, and good. It is sad, though. Quin has a secret life, the first thing he has ever had constructed by and belonging only to him, and each year it will grow. One day he was singing a song I had never heard before. “What is that song?” I asked. “I can’t teach it to you,” he said. Today, it is can’t. Tomorrow, won’t. Someday he may
teach it to me, but by that time I will already know it. That is the point, isn’t it?

I remember lying on the bed when my second child was handed to me, all mottled pink and blue like the wrapping paper at a baby shower; I looked down at the umbilical cord still attached to both our bodies. Then, snip—it begins. Separation. Distance. Perhaps, someday, estrangement. Privacy. Intimacy. Miss King makes better snacks than I do. Ah me.

W
ell, another year has gone by and still the Nobel Prize has not been awarded to the inventors of the Snugli baby carrier. I can’t figure it. Here you have someone (I prefer to think that it’s a woman) who has come up with an invention that takes literally hundreds of thousands of people who have lost the use of their hands and gives them a new lease on life. They can pick up oranges in the supermarket, they can flip through magazines, they can smear lipstick on the backs of their hands in a test try, and all this despite the fact that they have babies.

That this kind of achievement could go unrecognized is beyond me. The only people who have come close in the circles of civilization in which I currently mingle are the folks who developed the baby backpack and who took young impressionable people who heretofore thought the world consisted of knees, cuffs, and running
shoes and enabled them to see at adult eye level. I say bravo.

These are exciting times in which I live. My mother-in-law gasped at her first sight of a collapsible stroller. It was not the miracle of engineering, the sleek design; it was the bittersweet (in that order) memory of pushing perambulators the size of sanitation trucks up steps. My father, who had five children and yet whose experience at holding babies was basically confined to the baptismal font, was mesmerized by the sight of an infant confined to its mother’s chest in a blue corduroy Snugli. “They didn’t have anything like that when you were kids,” he said. Actually they did, but my mother owned the contraption; it was called arms, and it had no warranty and a limited life span.

Consider the snap-crotch T-shirt. It has changed life as I know it. Grown grandmothers, people who will commit physical violence at a good department-store sale, became emotional when they first saw it—in plain white, never mind the little pastel prints. Even the utilitarian Oshkosh overall is a phenomenon, sharing with the snap-crotch T-shirt the ability to cover a baby’s great protruding pot in a way hitherto unknown. Finally, babies are losing that sideshow look they had when they wore clothes like ours.

It is my theory that those clothes—the little pants that slipped below the belly, the little shirts that rose above it—were a visible manifestation of the contempt big business secretly had for babies. Babies drool, eat disgusting food, have rarely read anything interesting in the last week, and never buy low and sell high. Today, clothes for babies look different from clothes for adults, which is all to the good. This does not reflect any heightened respect for babies, only an appreciation of our need to pretend we have such heightened respect.

Nevertheless official recognition has lagged. Cynics would suggest that this is because babies have never been a compelling
special-interest group, but this belies the fact that most of the baby inventions of the last two decades were developed not for babies but for the convenience of adults. (The exception is the baby backpack, which is convenient only for those adults who incorporate into their regular weekly workout the lifting and carrying of twenty pounds of dead weight between their shoulder blades.) There is the Swyngomatic, which enables parents to consume enough calories to maintain body weight and energy. Most babies can tolerate the Swyngomatic for at least fifteen minutes, which has been shown to be sufficient time to throw the baby in the swing, wind it up, sit down, shovel your food in and have that all-important glass of wine before the baby starts to cry. Some babies are even said to be entertained by swinging in the Swyngomatic for a full hour at a time, although no one I know has ever actually met such a baby.

There is also the Sassy Seat, a freestanding baby seat that attaches to the end of a table and is held on by the weight of the child’s body within it. Many new parents think the wonderful thing about the Sassy Seat is that it eliminates the need for a high chair and can be taken anywhere. True, but not most important. The best thing about Sassy Seats is that grandmothers cannot figure out how they work and are in constant fear of the child’s falling. This often makes them forget to comment on other aspects of the child’s development, like why he is not yet talking or is still wearing diapers. Some grandmothers will spend an entire meal peering beneath the table and saying, “Is that thing steady?” rather than, “Have you had a doctor look at that left hand?” This is clearly more important than being able to take the seat to a restaurant.

One can only assume that the big boys in Stockholm have never seen a Sassy Seat or have never had children. How else to explain their stubborn refusal to honor these phenomena
and their inventors, and their willingness to concentrate instead on biomolecular theory and the cultivation of strange little things in pond scum?

Next year I will lobby again for the Snugli and, failing that, the snap-crotch T-shirt. (I’m sure I am not the only one who has hypothesized that both are a product of the same fertile mind.) In the meantime, I feel a groundswell of support building for those little refastenable tapes on disposable diapers. A mother of four grown children said just the other day that if she had had them, it would have changed her life; it would have erased forever the myriad tiny holes made by diaper pins that she still carries, even today, in the tip of her index finger.

T
he most hateful words I’ve heard in the last three years were “He’ll need surgery.” It was not major surgery, thank God; we brought him in early in the morning and carried him out at sunset. But giving anyone permission to open up the blue-white body of your two-year-old is dreadful. I even held him while they administered the anesthesia, a bright idea I pursued with great parental indignation for the sake (allegedly) of the child’s psychological well-being, so that he would not be surrounded by strangers.

By the time I had on my white paper moon suit, my surgical mask and my cap, I could have been Lon Chaney for all he knew; that I was helping to hold him down as he struggled didn’t seem to diminish the terror in his eyes. The only effect of the exercise was that I had to leave the operating theater, fall against my husband, and burst into tears on his shirt front, my nose running into my disposable mask.

Other parents gasp when they hear this story, and on paper it is probably the worst thing that has happened to my child since he was born, although the three stitches in the palm of his hand last month run a close second. In reality, things like this do not bother me as much as I thought they would. I am pretty good at emergencies, amazingly calm and well-organized considering that I am the sort who never seems able to find two matching shoes in my closet.