My father came to Christchurch in the middle 1960s from his home province of Southland, cheerful and friendly but with a lack of social power and mobility that was the general lot of young, single people in this country at that time. As was also the convention of the time, he was befriended by a handful of older colleagues and acquaintances who took an interest in him and made it their business to see that he was getting out and about and not spending too much time alone. One of these was a work colleague whose expression of interest in learning bellringing at the Cathedral, where she went to church, had been declined due to her being a woman. In a forthright manner befitting her heritage and education as an Old Cantabrian, she suggested my father take up the hobby in her stead.
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This baby in a bonnet at a wedding is but tangentially connected to the substance of this post.
The day the baby was six months old, the day on which we headed north to Nelson for a wedding, was also the day on which, seven years earlier, I started these pages. The first posts were a mix of specificity and citations from poetry and pop music. I was living a life that was physically simpler but emotionally a lot more complicated, and I spent the first six months online hashing out that curious mixture of pride, worry and regret that was my slow slide towards thirty. The narratives were peopled by my local friends and I gave them all allusive and largely arch pseudonyms, few of which referred to anything much except the associative linkings of my own whims. Poor Dangermouse particularly disliked his; a random archival tweet this week reminded me that as recently as four years ago he was still demanding I change it (in that case, to a Castilian Ignacio), but I was stubborn, and would not.
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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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15 January, 2011
in commentatrix,in Aotearoa,meta-diarist,O internet,the social round,we are family,writing & research
This baby in a bonnet at a wedding is but tangentially connected to the substance of this post.
The day the baby was six months old, the day on which we headed north to Nelson for a wedding, was also the day on which, seven years earlier, I started these pages. The first posts were a mix of specificity and citations from poetry and pop music. I was living a life that was physically simpler but emotionally a lot more complicated, and I spent the first six months online hashing out that curious mixture of pride, worry and regret that was my slow slide towards thirty. The narratives were peopled by my local friends and I gave them all allusive and largely arch pseudonyms, few of which referred to anything much except the associative linkings of my own whims. Poor Dangermouse particularly disliked his; a random archival tweet this week reminded me that as recently as four years ago he was still demanding I change it (in that case, to a Castilian Ignacio), but I was stubborn, and would not.
[click to continue…]
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