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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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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To the point of abstraction
I understood that, after the baby was born, I would not be able regularly to go out, but had no real understanding of how, in fact, I wouldn’t want regularly to go out. So it’s been that the slightly thinner social calendar the señor and I have maintained has taken place largely in the company of the baby — our first choice — or a furtive slipping out of the one while the other looks after her. I had expected the juggling but not the ambivalence, the feeling that I don’t mind the months slipping by when I can spend them in her company.
Still, we have been out, we have seen some people, we have done some things. The more aesthetic outings have been higher in my memory of late, for the line they trace between my long-form antenatal thoughts and the present. The baby was still little enough to sleep through the whole affair when Governor’s Bay Jay, the señor and I caught one of the last days of the Andrew Drummond sculptural exhibition at the Christchurch Art Gallery. So much had been said and written by others in highly anticipating this show, but so much of it was said and written before my daughter was born, and I felt cut adrift from the critical engagement as a result. We walked around the structural forms, the three of us, one eye on the works and one eye on the baby. The señor, who had to leave early for work, practised his lightning-fast version of art criticism, made all the swifter by the speed at which he speaks. It’s about the shadows as much as the working structures, he said. Look at how the lighting casts a second exhibition on the wall.
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When it comes to art, I enjoy complicated failures, an unintended consequence of all those years spent studying the unpublished fringes of New Zealand modernism. When first I heard of it, therefore, I knew that The Room would likely be well up my street. The opportunity to see it in a theatre at this year’s film festival was too good to pass up, and so it was that it became the first (and thus far, only) outing for which a babysitter was required since the birth of the harvestbaby. I left her in the care of her grandparents and joined my lady-date, Wellington’s knowing cultural connoisseuse, at Hoyts Riccarton.
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Centripetal Emotion
The baby is a cementer, changer and concluder of relationships, and the baby’s needs a force around which the day spins in a variety of sometimes-predictable ways. We are initiated via experience into all kinds of secret societies. There is the witching hour, which runs any time from four until ten p.m. in our house, when the young cannot be pacified, entertained or settled and mothercraft becomes indistinguishable from chance and magic. There is the fallacious phrase “leg guards” concerning the nappies of a baby not much bigger in size than a newborn. There are the long moments and short hours of a life running entirely on hormones, in which holding a contended baby is the sweetest fix of all. The erratic sleep, strange dreams and rapid mood swings are like being a teenager in love, with the accompanying rising and setting of the emotional sun. Then there is the maternal body that, in spite of the habits of a lifetime, continues to shrink. This last point is in itself neutral were it not for the general bagging and falling down of jeans that were bought to fit. Money is tight, and I’d rather spend it on her (save for buying blue cheese, which never loses its deliciousness after a long abstention).
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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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