Wednesday, July 13, 2005

The First It's a little weird having a brand new human being.  They're an empty vessel.  These babies?  They don't know nuttin'. I keep thinking that, somewhere in there, he really knows English and just chooses not to use it.  But no - he doesn't know language yet.  He doesn't know yet that you can say stuff and other people understand it.  He doesn't yet know that his hands are attached to his body, and that he controls them.  I try to show him things and sometimes I find myself telling him, "Remember this?  Remember the little puppy rattle (or whatever?"  No, he doesn't.  His brain doesn't remember yet.  He has to learn how to remember.  How weird is that? He doesn't know anything yet.  He doesn't know about grass or bees or baseball or wind or guitar chords or anything.  He doesn't know yet that he's on Earth.  He doesn't know that it's July.  He doesn't know what air is.  He doesn't know that the sun exists. Here's what he knows. I get hungry every couple of hours. This stuff comes out of my body, and one of those people comes and takes the thing off my butt, and puts another thing on.  Then more stuff comes out into that one. Those people are the only people I've been looking at since the beginning.  They're important to me.  Not sure how, but they're the ones who feed me and change my stuff and carry me when I get mad. And finally - waah.  He knows "waah."  He knows this, because he says it over and over and over again when things just get intolerable.  He also knows that "those people" - us - are responsible for him, because when he goes "waah," we do something.  We turn off the mobile.  We pick him up.  We feed him. (Okay, mom feeds him.  Mom's the one with the boobs.)  We do our job, which is to meet his needs.  Sometimes, he stares so intently into our eyes it looks like he's memorizing every pore and freckle.  I've never had anyone's eyes bore into me like that.  It's an intensely powerful feeling, being studied like that.  It's like being inhaled.  There is a point in everyone's life where they start to do stuff for the first time.  The first time they eat solid food, the first time they sleep through the night.  Think about that.  You sleep through the night now and think nothing of it.  You eat with a fork and spoon.  You can throw something up with your hand and catch it.  You smile on your own.  Once upon a time, you couldn't do any of that.  And the first time you did it, it was like magic.  This was the week that he started smiling.  All of the books - I'm not kidding, all of them - will tell you that the first smiles are just gas.  It seems like a weird way to react.  Hey, I've got some weird bubbling in my tummy.  Smile!!  But that's how it works.  And then suddenly they learn how to smile, and that's the moment when you, as parents,  lose your mind.  When the smiles come, that's when you grin yourself like a chimpanzee and want to dance around and call every relative within cell phone range.   "He smiled!  He really smiled!"  And they all go, yes, we know, as if you're saying, "the sun talked to me today!"  When you see your baby smiling - doing something on his own, controlling an expression - it's like a whole other level of birth.  It's like he crosses a threshold from blob into a real, thinking, responding human being, who sees your face and can do nothing more than smile from ear to ear, that great big goony face you've only seen on smileyface emoticons.   He knows you.  He's smiling because he knows that it's you, not a stranger, not just some nurse.  "Hey!  It's you!" He's also giggling.  He giggled at mom earlier today.  She was playing with him and being silly, and he looked up at her and went, "heh heh heh." And grinned.  He did it twice, so she knows he was serious.  He now officially owns us. 8:04:55 PM     Speak up!  []