Myth Happens

I have now spent the second of two consecutive Tuesdays with my mother in Lexington, helping take care of her four-month-old granddaughter: my brother's daughter, my niece. Her name is Charlotte. She shares a birthday with Ada Lovelace. The major events of the afternoon can be summarized by two e-mails I sent derspatchel, respectively entitled "I have fed a baby" and "I have been thrown up on by a baby!"

The first of these was the more dramatic. My mother feeds Charlotte in the recliner in the living room, meaning I accidentally triggered a Pavlovian reaction when I sat down in it with her in my arms. She began to make small questioning sounds, twisting her head as much as she could to look plaintively at me. I told her the food was coming—my mother was preparing the formula in the kitchen—but the sounds grew louder and more insistent as I kissed the top of her head and tried to talk to her distractingly and finally she grabbed my index finger in both tiny, gripping hands and shoved it into her mouth. If she doesn't have teeth within the next two weeks, I will be very surprised, because there is a hard little ridge at the bottom of that mouth and she used it to bite in no uncertain terms. It did not make milk come out of my finger. She sucked harder. My finger remained a finger. I thought she might at least use it as a pacifier until the formula got there, but she bit a few more times, flung my finger away, and burst into heartrending screams. I know the frequency of a baby's cry has evolved to be as distressing as possible, so as to get prompt results, but I was still surprised at the sheer biological intensity of feeling like a terrible person that brickbats into the back of your head when you hold a baby who's crying with hunger and you have no immediate means of assuaging it. As soon as the bottle arrived, I had just started to angle the nipple into her mouth when she grabbed it herself and popped it straight in. And then fed for the next half-hour with dedication, occasionally slowing and looking sleepy, at which point I'd ask if she was done and she'd begin ferociously nursing again, as if to make very sure I didn't take the bottle away. I didn't. She drained it. She's still a little wary when she's not on her home ground, so she wouldn't fall asleep with me, but she did with my mother. The nursery is the room that used to be mine, repainted and decorated with family photographs and art; my father restored the crib she sleeps in. One wall is painted violet. It is very calm and airy and she seems to like it, which is the important thing.

The second was just inevitable: she cleverly dodged the cloth on my shoulder and ejected ex-milk all over my sleeve and upper arm. I handed her back to my mother and discovered that ex-milk does not like to come out of cotton T-shirts. I think my first-ever piece of advice to my niece may have been, "I know. Having a digestive system is hard."

She reminds me very much of a young cat. She likes heights; if you hold her against your shoulder, she will pull herself up with her hands until she's semi-standing, bracing with clenched fists on the shoulder ridge to get a better view. (She used my collarbone as a handhold. She grips onto your shirt. I had cleverly tucked my hair down the back of mine or I think she would have tried to rope-climb it.) She likes being carried around to look at things; she especially likes looking out windows. She will make noises if she sees something beyond the glass that's of interest. She's not really self-propelled yet. As of two weeks ago, she can roll over, and she understands how crawling is supposed to work, but she doesn't quite have the muscle development to make it happen—if placed on her stomach, she will push with her feet and grasp determinedly with her hands in impatient, swimming motions while the rest of her remains in solid contact with the floor. It seems to frustrate her very much that she doesn't go anywhere; she brightened up when I lifted her gently under the arms and scooted her forward with each movement, so that she could feel like she was crawling. She laughs when my mother swooshes her into the air. I suspect that once she achieves mobility, she'll be unstoppable. She's very talkative, too. It's much less difficult than I expected to tell which are fretful sounds and which are curious sounds and which mean that she's tired and/or overstimulated versus actually in distress, hunger or pain. She likes being sung to. Over and over again. I'm told her favorite song right now is "Camptown Races"; she also responded well to "The Dodger," which has a similarly bouncy melody (and as far as I know zero chance of having started life as a minstrel song). She reacts to music with a visible smile. I walked her around the house and lay on the floor to watch her practice crawling and told her that she's quick and strong and clever and skilled and when she's older she'll climb mountains and she's interested in the world so she'll learn all sorts of things from it and she'll sing with me unless she turns out tone-deaf, in which case I'll get her a drum kit and her parents will thank me forever. It is astonishing to me how much of a person she is already.

She is a very pink-and-white baby. Not like a painted doll, just almost translucently fair. Her eyes are a wide grey-blue; her hair right now is coming in reddish. She may keep this coloring: her mother's family are all light-haired, light-eyed people, French-Canadian within the last century; on her father's side, she has a green-eyed great-grandfather and a great-uncle with blue eyes, both of whom were redheads of some degree; there's a decent chance. No matter what, I will continue telling her she's beautiful, because she will be. I do not think it is unimportant to tell people they're beautiful. Most of the people I love don't seem to have heard it enough.

Otherwise my life in the last few days seems to have been composed of financial problems and not sleeping, both of which are an ongoing situation; that is a lot less interesting than a new baby. New baby is surprisingly interesting. I still don't want one of my own—there are ways in which it will be weird if I ever really, biologically do—but I'm glad she's in our lives.