There are no new words

but sometimes the old ones are enough

When the baby yawns, it sounds like he is eating air — his little mouth widens, tiny new teeth glinting — and then ¡CHOMP! as he pushes the air out and shuts his mouth. He presses his little lips together, pleased as punch. It's a greedy motion; one of many he performs. Almost everything he does is greedy right now. He wants It all, whatever It is. But. ‘Greed’ feels like the wrong word; he is not avaricious. There is no ill intent in his quest to accumulate. There are no rainy days on his horizons that would necessitate stockpiling. He hoards nothing. He is just… trying to become himself. 

He walks so fast that it's a wonder he doesn't fall more often. He wants to run. So bad. And sometimes he succeeds for brief moments. He talks even when he sleeps — babble sounds that approximate what he heard when he was awake, his brain seemingly unable to synthesise information quietly. He talks from the moment he wakes up, a mix of sign — current faves: “food” and “milk” — and jumbled up spoken words. His clearest word, perhaps inevitably, is “mama.” He will say it six, seven times in a row, making music as he changes inflection. When he babbles, or repeats a word we say to him, I am curious to know if he thinks he's perfectly intelligible, if he believes his sounds to be 'accurate' — perfect cover versions of the words we say to him. At this stage of life, he processes loudly, as required. No timetable for learning; it's happening every minute he's awake and even when he snoozes. And he often does not want to sleep — his lust for consciousness is also greedy. He barely wants to blink, let alone close his eyes for the 11-12 hours he needs overnight. Let's not talk about the naps. Sometimes he elects to go to bed when the sun is up — he will toddle to the sound machine, eyelids heavy, and gesture at it as if to say, “come on, then!” Or he will stand in front of the sofa and bend over at the waist to rest his head on the cushion, almost tearful with the need to reset. But the rest of the time, he rages, rages, rages against the nap. Why should I have to sleep? his angry eyebrows ask.

I sometimes sing or hum 'Edelweiss' to him to send him off at night. Something pretty so his dreams are sweet. (now, though, the innocuous lyric, “Small and white/clean and bright” makes me narrow my eyes suspiciously). Sometimes we sing ‘Go’ by Common. We repeat the John Mayer hook, over and over, and at the end of it, I say the Kanye line: “on the count of three/everybody run back to your fantasy.” Which, yeah. The baby has a whole playlist (Imogen Heap, Rebecca Black… other, more questionable songs) that his nanny has compiled, skewing his Spotify Unwrapped for the foreseeable future. A worthy sacrifice, he says.

These days I find myself singing ‘Moon River’ more. The original, though I play the Frank Ocean cover on the speaker sometimes. I repeat “there's such a lot of world to see” over snd over and I pretend he understands what I'm saying. I don't tell him about the terrors of the world yet. 

There are glimpses of the child that will emerge after toddlerhood already - the face is slimming out and the limbs are lengthening. There are no new words for what I am feeling about all this. But sometimes the old ones are enough. I miss the sentient potato stage as much as I look forward to having conversations, being unequivocally understood, and truly understanding right back. Sometimes, he will tilt his head like one of my brothers when he was a teen, or he will throw his head back and laugh with pure delight, like the other one. Or he'll grip something between big toe and second toe and I'll think, “that's me! I do that!” He likes music (will he play the drums, like I did? I am doing all I can to influence him). When he hears a beat he likes, he will wiggle his torso, bend at the knees, do a sort of staccato body roll. Other times, he quite clearly catches the beat and nods along like an old hip-hop head. That makes me inordinately proud. We discovered he loves A Tribe Called Quest, The Specials, Slayer and AC/DC. He loves throwing his ball. He loves the outdoors, wants to be with the people, soaking up the human energy of New York. He could be a politician on the trail, the way he tirelessly extends his palms, waves, says a bright and cheery “hi!” to complete strangers. He’s not a fan of his rear-facing car seat, but he likes the subway, adores the bus. His eyes are so big when he's outside. They're greedy they eat up the world. There's such a lot of world to see.

Impossible to ignore in this season of plenty for my child — always, and pressingly so now — are the other children, whose parents will not see them become older. The ones with amputated limbs and dead-eyed stares, the ones trembling and living in a world where terror comes into the house with astonishing ease, and rains down pain relentlessly. The ones with dead parents. The ones who have themselves been killed. Every image of those children breaks a small part of me down, in a way that seeing my own kid thriving cannot fully heal. The ache feels pointed and personal. I have to look. Not looking, not seeing... it feels dishonorable. Antithetical to my profession, at the very least. In the absence of the humanity that would/should have kept them here, the least I can do is mourn them. See them, acknowledge their existence, snuffed out too soon. The same way I notice and note my baby grow taller, smarter, funnier, more human. I hope, I pray. I make dua. I hug my baby, I kiss his cheeks, his nose, his eyelids. I rub lotion into his skin. I feed him, from my body. I rock him to sleep. I cry, I pray. I feel hopeless, I feel shame. I pray, I hope regardless.

There are no new words for what I am feeling about this. But sometimes the old ones are enough.