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• Aliens Among Us

  Babies are a little creepy.  Sure, they're tiny miracles, all adorable and snugly, and ad campaigns are launched on their wee chubby toes and cheeks, but sometimes they give me the sort of shivers I get upon hearing that someone's pinky got cut off in wood shop or seeing someone's elbows bend in a direction the human elbow should never go.    Axel was wailing the other night with such force that I thought he had to be in pain - it couldn't just be from the lotion I was rubbing on his arms after his bath.  I looked down at his wrist and shrieked because it had been broken or dislocated and I was a horrible mother and hadn't noticed for who knows how long.  Actually, his wrist is fine and, yes, I was overreacting just a tad and, you're right, it's possible Axel gets some of his dramatic tendencies from me.  His wrists do look misaligned, though.  Baby wrists sit at a funny angle, the oddness of which is exacerbated by the mushy layer of undeveloped muscle that is the baby forearm.     The next night, Axel sat in his highchair, happily rubbing pureed yams all over his face, and the evening sun lit up the whispy hairs on top of his head.  Then I noticed that that those hairs were moving up and down, because the little soft spot on his head was pulsing along with his heartbeat.  Then his head spun around and pineapple Jell-O came out of his forehead.   OK, there wasn't any Jell-O, but still, it just looked wrong.  I avoided touching his soft spot for months - feeling it beneath my fingers gave me the shivers - and had forgotten about it until I saw it moving again.     Other weird things:  babies don't really have kneecaps, just some sort of mush (yes, that is an official medical term) between their upper and lower leg.  Axel's foot got caught in the laundry basket and got a small cut - enough that it drew blood and has now scabbed over (note to Axel it twenty years: it was your dad's fault.  I wasn't even in the same room.).  The child didn't react a bit.  Try to wipe rice cereal off of his face, though, and he acts as though you're pulling out his spleen through his ear with a pair of tweezers.  Think about that: actual injury, no reaction.  Face wiping, big reaction.  Do babies have some amazing ability to withstand pain, or misaligned neurons?  And then there's babies' ability to tolerate crap all over their faces, including snot dripping all over the place and crusting underneath their noses, which is, if not creepy, sort of gross.  What's more, babies have the oversized head and big eyes of all the official alien photos from the black and white tabloids, the ones they run right next to the shots of the man pregnant with triplets and the two-headed bat that has read Romeo and Juliet.    Don't get me wrong - I think my son could beat a dozen puppies in a cute contest.  I think he's shown unmistakeable signs of genius (you know, like banging a wooden spoon against a pot all by himself).   I hug and kiss him when he's covered in all sorts of slime, plan to encourage him to roll around in the mud, and am not averse to getting dirty myself.  But sometimes the miracles of his little developing body give me the creeps.        Posted Jun 06 2008, 07:58 AM by knockedup with | with 9 comment(s) Filed under: alien baby, babies are creepy

• Heartbreaker

  My baby breaks my heart ten times a day.  He cries, and I want to (and sometimes do) cry, too.  I think of the things that will happen to him when he's older - that he'll fall in love with someone who won't love him back, that he'll get sick or break bones, that he'll try to achieve something and will fail, and that I won't be able to help.  Sometimes, when he's snuggled in my lap and a sleepy smile spreads across his face, I'm flooded with love for him so deep that I feel like my joy can't be contained.  All of these kinds of heartache, the good and the bad, I expected; they're deeper and more encompassing that I could have guessed, but I'd heard about them from other parents.    But sometimes, I feel a little heart broken because I don't think I love my baby the way that I should.  Sometimes, he seems like nothing so much as a warm, pudgy robot.  Who is he?  What is he?  What could he possibly be thinking?  And how did he end up in my house, demanding so much that I'm not sure I can give?    If a car fell on top of him, I don't think I would be overcome by one of those heroic motherly bursts of strength and be able to lift it off of his body.  At times I feel like I love him on the same level - okay, a little more, but not dramatically - as I love my dog.  And I'm not one of those dog-obsessed people who tries to bring their dog to dinner parties.  I recognize that my dog is not a person.  So I guess that means that my baby doesn't feel like a person to me - probably because he doesn't use much nonverbal or any verbal language, and he's such a tumultous mass of bodily functions.  People say babies develop personality after a few months, and, though Axel certainly seems to be showing glimmers of being chatty like his father,  generally cheerful like his mother, and headstrong like both parents, it's a shadowy version of person-ness.    Shouldn't I, as his mother, feel a gushy sense of love for him constantly, instead of vascilating between adoration and detached thoughts about my son's resemblance to all of the drawings I've ever seen of big eyed, bulbous-bellied aliens?  Shouldn't I be able to automatically say that, if there were some horrible deathly virus spreading the earth and I could only save one person, I would pick my son, instead of knowing that, in that highly unlikey situation, I would have to really think about it?   Shouldn't I automatically want to change his diaper when I hear him poop, rather than thinking that it's not so bad for him to sleep a little longer and he'll be fine if he stays dirty for awhile, and having slight twinges of, dare I say, unreasonable resentment that he couldn't have gotten all his poop out before I changed his diaper just ten minutes ago?    He still, after six weeks, feels so foreign to me.  Moments after I wonder if he's just a crazed little beast come to drive me batty by screeching in my ear, he flashes me a grin and burrows his head into my shoulder, and I tell him, honestly, that I love him more than I can say.   I adore my son - in ways I could not have guessed that I would, and just the thought of losing him threatens to rend my aorta to shreds - but also, in some ways, less than I thought I would.  My mom always says that she liked me and my brother more as we grew older, as she learned more about who we were and as we could talk, and tell her what we were thinking and what we needed.  In some ways, I think that means she loved us more, too  - though she'd never say that - and that her love for us evolved and changed as we did.  I'm still in the midst of falling in love with my boy, in my own slightly chaotic and bumpy way.        Posted Dec 18 2007, 08:15 AM by knockedup with | with 23 comment(s) Filed under: development of personality, falling in love with a newborn, alien baby