The first days of acquiring the practical knowledge of maternity were very much akin to drawing out Leviathan with an hook, a process that felt all the more surreal by the fact of having been delivered of a non-metaphorical Leviathan so very recently, whose nearby tininess belied the effort. Everywhere were signs: signs that displayed policy, signs that explained how policy is to be implemented, health-promotional signs that gave instructions that reflect the policy. All of this to keep the baby floating above that netherland known as Failure to Thrive, whose abyss we sensed beneath the bilibed and whose name was never spoken.
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You are All My Base and belong to me
Little gives as much pleasure as watching my daughter realise her intentions: look at the object, reach for the object, put the object in the mouth. Her language-world is mostly sensate: primarily taste and oral sensation, but also texture to the touch. What she sees seems to function mostly as spectacle, as witnessed when she shook with giggles at the sight of each of the dogs eating their dinner. To “hi!” and “hello!” she can respond in kind, sometimes with the H and sometimes without. Consonants are less important in her world than long flat vowels.
There are other vocabularies too, and they accord, in some ways coincidentally, with those of her parents. The unserious epithet, Boob Lady, by which I at home go, has been tethered recently by her own name for me: a fixed-gaze to make sure I am looking, then, almost imperceptibly, a quick movement of the tongue that, latched, would bring about the start of a feed. This is not the reductive expression I might once have thought it would be, since there is no-one else, after all, who provides for her that thing, and I know the whole of what I went through to be able to do it.
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Dead Canterbury lawn after a day of rain.
The señor and I are sociable but introverted, and are welcoming as a result the opportunity to sit quietly through today’s rain after several days of hot dry winds and high holiday gaiety. The high-rolling aftershocks that brought the city to a halt on Boxing Day did not shake us so hard here, behind the epicentre. Nonetheless they exerted a slowing effect, bringing back that feeling of moving through treacle and not quite being able to remember what it was we were just doing that, over a short enough time, sends even the most resolutely-maintained mood descending.
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Table-biting not connected to ill-health.
A sick baby cuts across all other narratives with the efficiency of a guillotine. It’s not so much the drama of the symptoms, which are limited enough in range, but the need for vigilance, the watching out for the grimmer, scarier and yet similar symptoms that sharpens the mind. Harvestbaby has stayed safely within the realm of not seriously ill, with the right kind of temperature, the right kind of rash and the right kind of crying, to keep our minds somewhat eased, but those other fevers, rashes and cries stay in the mind’s eye like shapes seen in a too-bright light.
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Not a bottle-fed baby
By divination, by delay and by close repeated scrutiny of the relevant, state-sponsored literature, the señor and I have established that the baby is ready for solids. We also went to a workshop, arriving at the wrong time thanks to a momentary deficit in my diary-keeping skills, and spending perhaps twenty minutes scrutinising the room of delightful babies of whom harvestbaby was both the oldest and the smallest. Her chubby robustness seems plentiful at home, but out amongst the wider baby population she is still petite and delicate enough to get away with releasing a thunderous burp while no-one was looking and leave everyone none the wiser as to whence it came.
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Posterous
Leviathan Ciphers
11 January, 2011
in at home,commentatrix,in Aotearoa,we are family
The first days of acquiring the practical knowledge of maternity were very much akin to drawing out Leviathan with an hook, a process that felt all the more surreal by the fact of having been delivered of a non-metaphorical Leviathan so very recently, whose nearby tininess belied the effort. Everywhere were signs: signs that displayed policy, signs that explained how policy is to be implemented, health-promotional signs that gave instructions that reflect the policy. All of this to keep the baby floating above that netherland known as Failure to Thrive, whose abyss we sensed beneath the bilibed and whose name was never spoken.
[click to continue…]
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