Consistent or Die

Yesterday I was sick and failed to blip.  Luckily, Grandma Gak showed up to care for you.  During the time she was here you slept for 2.5 hours.  Then I brought Thisbe home from school and Gak juggled the both of you, starting up the Little Mermaid soundtrack and helping to anchor the corners of Thisbe's tent forts while simultaneously bouncing your snot-faced little self.  Gak took Thisbe out to dinner and gave her a bath while Daddy took on the complete care of you after a fairly grueling day at work.

Today I feel much better but the temperature has plummeted: negative 22 when we woke up.  Cold coming through the plaster of the walls and around the edges of doors and windows.

I carry you on my hip now more and more (rather than facing you directly out front) and your new hair is coming in soft and blond.  Sometimes the day feels like a series of attempts at posing you, like a Gumby figurine: feet down and hands out in the exer-saucer, prone on the floor with toes raised, legs dangling and fists in mouth in the Bjorn, knees bent/elbows tucked nestled into the crook of my arm, C-curve of spine bent over your own toes while sitting on your bottom, and finally the dreaded cobra pose of tummy time.

You are happiest when you have your sister to watch or when an adult bends over you during a diaper change, a face inches from your own, eyes to eyes, full turning of attention into you.  You become more yourself during these moments--you babble more, you laugh when I nibble your fingers, you pinch gleefully at the skin of my cheeks.  You become differently alive under a direct and focused gaze.

And I guess here I should insert something about how with computers and cell phones and televisions and i-pods and our culture's shrinking attention span--woe is me!--that we don't spend enough time offering this gaze, this kind of looking, to our children.  And that's probably true.

But what I find more disturbing is perhaps how rarely I turn this gaze toward anyone else.  There's something about looking at you, Matteus, about looking at any baby, I suppose.  I am waiting for an emergence, for tiny changes and shifts.  I am expecting growth, am eager to be in awe of the tiny glimpses that show me who you are becoming.  I understand, of course, that it's not realistic to be this dotty with love for the barista at Blue Monday.  Indeed, I could probably get a special restraining order of some sort if I waited around for too long, trying to hold her gaze with the expectation that her true self would emerge.

But oftentimes when I listen to adults, I am listening for information.  For the flight time or the punch line.  Or I am trying to get the emotional gist of the story to offer appropriate expressions of compassion, horror, disbelief, humor, etc.  Sometimes I miss seeing the person because I'm too busy listening to what the person is saying. 

Sometimes I fail to recognize, too, that the adults around me, including those I think I know the best, are also changing.  There's something about becoming a parent that makes me feel called to stability.  The gurus of parenting advice admonish adults to be firm ground.  Unmoving, unshakable, static.  The steady sun for ceaseless orbiting.  Consistent or die.

As the child of divorce, I understand this advice.  Certainly parents are the main builders of the world their children dwell inside.  But I wonder if mid-life crises, if adultery and expensive cars and gambling addictions are born of feeling consistency as a call to sameness, as directive to shun or ignore our own need for growth and our own desire to mark that growth outwardly somehow.

Or maybe there's a part of me that, after shaking a rattle in front of your face for hour after hour in the sub-zero temperatures of early January, wonders if I am changing at all.