god the toddler almighty

0-18 months: from wizened mystic to full-throated personhood

When Bruce was born, my friend

Paolo Peralta

called him “fresh from the infinite,” and I’ve never heard anything so true.

Newborns emerge hot pink, shaped like toads—with tiny, angled butts, distended bellies and long, bowed legs. They’re hideous, but undeniably holy; wizened and wise, quiet and limp, spirits stunned into silence by their arrival into matter. They choose your body as their portal.

Whoah.

0-3 months: resting buddha

All the tiny mystics I’ve known behave the same way: sleeping for fourteen days straight, pressed against my heart, legs crossed as they were in the womb…Resting Buddha Pose. There’s nothing for a newborn to think about—nothing for them to know—so I assume they dream of the infinite and sometimes, when their breathing gets quiet and shallow, I panic, convinced they’ve been called back. Why be in the world—all bright lights and chilly air—when you could float in the nutritive, amniotic broth of unified consciousness?

Did you know that almost everyone—righty or lefty—holds a baby over the left side of their body? It’s well-documented, studied against all manner of hypotheses, but here’s my reason: I want our hearts to touch. It keeps the portal ripe and partway open. I’ve never felt this electromagnetic resonance anywhere else—it's the feeling of love, passing between bodies.

You want to live these days forever, but of course, you can’t, so you panic. You turn your anxiety into preemptive nostalgia and it becomes tyrannical. Never be apart. Don’t miss a minute. This is once-in-a-lifetime, so hold on tight.

You’re overwhelmed by fatigue and adrenaline, ragged with happiness, wracked with guilt. It’s all too poignant. It’s all your fault. There’s a hormone cliff on the other side of that portal and you’ve fallen face-first to the dark bottom.

The joy is despairing. God can be a lot.

3-12 months: agreeable projection

Middle / late-stage babies—the ones who smile and sit and reach with dimpled fingers—are more angelic than mystical. They grow solid enough not to randomly stop breathing, which helps with the sleep and the hormone cliff. They choose you, every day, over a return to the infinite. The cuts, chafes and chaps begin to heal. You sling the baby around with well-practiced grace. You’re made for this, and for each other. You’re lucky if you sink in all the way.

You’re mesmerized, not because you’re staring at the wrinkled face of God, but because you’re staring at your own face, shimmering with innocence. The mirror neurons fire hard—both ways. How could you not be fooled into thinking this baby will become a parallel of your personality, your likes and dislikes? He’s watching you so closely. When you laugh, he laughs. He shakes with happiness when you come into the room.

The purity of this baby feels undeserved, nearly unbearable. You can’t hold the weight of a gaze so precious, even when you’re giggling, biting his corn-kernel toes. Maybe this time, it’ll last forever, though you have on good information it ends at a year.

Still, you let yourself believe. And every day you count down to that first birthday with a sick twist of dread. Thinking… maybe this one’ll keep.

The attitude! Mother About to Wash Her Sleepy Child // Mary Cassatt

a year +

On day 365, your baby becomes a toddler… a perfectly ungainly word for when the infinite recedes and the human comes fully into view. Definitions are so cruel. How awful that on a single day, you can no longer—with literal accuracy—say, ‘my baby.’ You were right to worry about what the change foretells, but he makes it easy to stop feeling so clingy.

Because now he kicks, screams and throws his fists at your face. He tries to climb out of your arms and into the hands of the pretty supermarket checkout gal. He no longer wants to lie (or sit) heart-to-heart. He’s too busy pointing at the vacuum, demanding you turn it on and off again and again, and he will rage if you unplug it.

His likes and dislikes are uncompromising and they are not yours. He careens through the house, palms to the sky, making loud, gibberish pronouncements and confirming them for himself with a solid nod. He also knows many English words. His favorite is NO.

His ego’s tolerable because his flesh feels as soft as the skin of a ripe nectarine and his breath still smells sweet in the morning. His mischievous giggle makes you weak at the knees. When he’s sick or tired, his head burrows into your left shoulder and the portal pulses open again.

Sometimes, at night, you’ll hold him for an hour and a half, just to listen to his snoozy nose-whistle. Still and silent, he’s holy again. You begin to understand that creepy/ sad book about the mother climbing into her grown son’s bedroom to rock him and sing.

infinite humor

This must be one of God’s favorite punks—giving us tiny, helpless mystics who morph so fast into the unvarnished petulance of all mankind: impatient, blabbering, impulsive, driven by manic wanting and ecstatic despair.

What a trick, what a marvel. And what a relief.

Because now we can relax. The burden of nostalgia lifts and rowdiness resumes. We’re relieved of trying to hold onto these sacred creatures because… they won’t let us. They’re only human after all.

Maybe it’s by design. It’s easier, for example, to offer your kid autonomy when he’s punching you in the face. Go right ahead, pal, I don’t want to hold you anyway. Maybe you’ll even feel moved to start over, called to replace your emerging tyrant with a fresh, hot-pink sage. I have a friend with five kids— “Every time they learn to say ‘No,’ I want to start over.” I took note of this; I check myself often.

And how ironic that toddlers turn our projections around. They’re annoying because they’re so like us—but without self-censorship or social grace. No wonder we humans are irritable. We emerge as objects of gut-wrenching wonder, but as soon as we become ourselves, we break the bond of early love, screaming and raging, trying to get it back in all the wrong ways.

And to top it off, we spent our most holy, most glorified days shaped like a toad.

But hey, if we came from the infinite, its wisdom’s in us still. I try to remember this when Bruce scratches at my eyeballs as I pull him off the vacuum. I try to remember when I hear suited toddlers lashing out on T.V. “Have you said thank you once, in this entire meeting?”

I remember that even the villains started as mystics. Shaped like toads.

xx

Isabel

Questions:

1. Have you ever been struck dumb by the sacredness of another person? How? When!

2. Have you ever locked eyes with a toddler, standing behind a chair/ hiding behind a curtain…pooping? (Not you, them.) Did you break the gaze? Stare ‘em down harder? & Is it not the strangest early-impulse of all?

Finally, have a look at

Charlotte // Baby Brain

’s thoughts on these same pangs. Her anonymous quotation made me smile very, very hard.

“People tell you the newborn stage is the hardest... DO NOT LISTEN. The newborn stage is THE BEST. They sleep, they cuddle, their little cry is adorable. Toddlers are savages. Toddlers do not fucking care." - (source unknown)