SHARON LERNER
a FEW MONTHS BACK, a fellow mother on the playground told me that researchers had just declared that age four-and-a-half was the definitive peak of cuteness in children. The woman delivered this nugget, which horrified and terrified me, as a simple statement of fact. She had read it in a newspaper, I think, and mentioned the finding casually in between sips of decaf and bits of less consequential playground news items. You know: I hear the principal may be retiring next year. The new second grade teacher apparently runs the classroom like a little economy. Oh, and by the way: Your kids will never be this cute again!
I never did look for the study that yielded this finding, though I can imagine how some scientist might have paraded a series of children of various ages in front of adult viewers and measured their prolactin levels or the number of times they said “awww.” I picture the adult subjects behind a one-way mirror, with probes affixed to their heads, or perhaps their nipples, as the series of kids appear in front of them. And I have no problem envisioning how, at two and three, the little squishy dumpling people with big eyes, chubby hands and tiny vocabularies elicit far more appreciative sighs and hormone gushes than the stretched out, more self-conscious older ones.
I believe the news she delivered to be true, based on my utterly non-scientific observation that humans have a tendency to melt over puppies, kittens, and baby anythings, and get wiggy around old people. It’s not news that adult people aren’t particularly cute. The advance is that scientists are finally trying to map and explore this uncharted human territory in between the poles, getting specific about when exactly the enchantment ends and the revulsion begins.
I also viscerally understood what this woman was saying, because as she was delivering the news about the apex of cute, my own kids were teetering on this delicate peak. Actually, they had already tipped over it. Already, there were many occasions when I found them not just uncute, but deeply disgusting. Yes, my own children. My younger son was just then a few weeks past the critical four-and-a-half mark, and my older one was two years ahead of him. Scientifically speaking, their cutest days were behind them.
It seems somehow cruel to distill the appeal of having kids to its short-lived essence. It feels shameful to acknowledge the bald dynamics of the parent-child trade off. But, if we’re truthful, we may as well admit to the economics of the parenthood business. We adults get cuddles; dewy, adoring looks; and warm hands to hold—love, if you will—in exchange for providing the care necessary for our little ones to have a chance to survive into adulthood, at which point they may come at this whole bargain from the other side. Those of us who actually plan to have our kids enter into this arrangement willingly and selfishly—if not terribly consciously. Before taking the plunge ourselves, we watch our friends and relatives with their own children, and somehow it seems like a good deal.
From an evolutionary standpoint, you can see why we humans would have developed a combination of chemistry and wiring that draws us to the soft skin, innocent chub, and fine curls of little ones. We need something to get us through the middle-of-the-night risings, tantrums, and diaper changes. So if their shit smells terrible, their plump little folds of their thighs are so enticing, it doesn’t really matter! And the way they mispronounce “machine,” as in, “There’s a bunny-destroying chamine under my bed!” makes you almost forgive the fact that they’re saying this adorable thing at three in the morning.
The problem is, if their charms dissipate, the challenges and annoyances children pose clearly do not. This part I know, among other ways, from having posed such challenges and annoyances to my own parents. Lying, drugs, mischief—I did it all when I was younger. What’s more: I committed the worst of it, I now realize with horror, long after my baby fat was gone and my formerly soft face had broken out in blackheads and other nasty blemishes.
Thankfully, my parents held off on killing me. But putting a precise number on the end of cute leads me to wonder whether I will be able to pass on the evolutionary favor my parents bestowed upon me. More to the immediate point, I worry that my next few years will be spent in a gradual downward slide toward the unpleasant prospect of dealing with progressively less cute boys doing even less cute things. Had these past few years, filled with cuddly bedtime stories and games of “egg,” in which I sat on my boys’ balled up bodies waiting for them to “hatch,” been as good as it was going to get? Ever?
And then there’s the disturbing truth—my disturbing truth—that, even while at their theoretically cutest, my kids have always also been the opposite of cute: i.e., gross. At the pudgiest and most magical stage of his toddlerhood, when even the sourest of passersby could be caught flashing silly grins at him, one of my sons pooped in his room. This, of course, is pretty standard fare for little kids. What made this particular incident of defecation noteworthy is that we knew nothing of it at the time. To his credit, my little one quickly disposed of it. To his discredit—or at least our misfortune—he put it in his radiator. Secretly. We only discovered the hidden stash much later, when a foul odor prompted a sniff search that ultimately led his father and me to two desiccated turds perched on the heating coil.
Meanwhile, pretty much every meal consumed during the peak cute years has contained an element of horror. Yes, sure, there is a primal joy to be had in feeding your offspring, knowing that each bite gets them that much bigger and stronger; that with each meal, I am not just providing sustenance but continuing a process that has enabled an age-old series of organisms to evolve into these particular small creatures sitting at my table. But I never actually think such thoughts during our dinners, so focused am I on their little sauce-smeared hands as they caress their noodles; the thread of regurgitated cheese sauce that one of them has backwashed into my water glass; or the piece of scrambled egg that clings almost magically to one of their curls. Ew.
If the cuteness (which clearly offsets the disgust in some complex way yet to be studied) continues to dissipate, I fear I’ll have nothing to get me through dinner. Already, my six-year-old has shed much of his magical early childhood softness. Being short, like me, he can look younger than he is. But when you pick him up and he squeezes you between his vise-like thighs, you know. It takes years to develop the ropey muscularity he has. His little brother never seemed to have much baby fat. He didn’t have those bracelet-like folds of skin that form around some infants’ wrists or the hefty thighs that beg to be squeezed. Now, the tiny bit of chub remaining around his belly button seems to be getting smaller by the day. And most times when I try to gather it in my hand for a quick squish, he brushes me off with a mildly annoyed “Mom!” that might as well spring from the mouth of a teenager.
Perhaps it was my instinctive knowledge that the end of cute was upon us that sparked my nightly ritual of watching my kids sleep. Since the littler one turned four, I’ve been stopping into their rooms at night before I head to mine, crouching by their beds where I can still smell the cuteness in their breath. These visits seem to erase whatever awfulness might have transpired during the day. With their stuffed animals held tight, their eyes closed, and their chests gently heaving, my kids are still little and cute at night.
I begin to conjure these nighttime forays while I’m still standing on the playground. By now, the mother who delivered the bomb has left, unaware that she has launched a panic about the dwindling cuteness of my children. And I’m onto devising solutions. Perhaps it’ll be enough to continue my nighttime visits well into adolescence. If my boys will be acne-covered and hostile during the day, maybe at night they’ll retain some of their current sweetness, even as they snore away in their dirty-sock-scented rooms. Adolescent night visits could function sort of like dialysis: spending a certain amount of time inhaling their sleepy breath could provide me the strength to handle whatever icky affronts they bring during the day.
I’m enjoying the thought of myself stealing into the bedrooms of my teenagers, drinking their breath like medicine, when my older son suddenly body slams me on the playground. He tries hard not to cry, so I know whatever has driven him to smoosh his face into my jacket must be pretty serious. But as usual, he offers no details, keeping his head silently pressed into me as the tears subside. It’s a childlike pose if there ever was one—crying and clutching your mother for comfort. But, as I look down on him, I realize he doesn’t look cute—or, rather, he doesn’t just look cute.
Spurred, no doubt, by my recent brush with the research, I try to affect a scientific eye as I scrutinize this strange creature attached to me. I see the dark, crescent-moon of playground dirt under each of his nails; the way his wiry curls, already so much more like an adult’s than a baby’s, grow way lower down on his forehead than where most people’s hairlines begin; the snot that’s smeared across his right cheek—and, now, yes, on my jacket, too. And it occurs to me that already there is already so much that is not cute about him—or at least “cute” in the sense that it would register as such in a research study.
As I’m waiting for him to pull back away from me and rejoin the kickball game, I’m struck by the familiar guilt of being grossed out by my own kid. The truth is, as far back as infancy, when they should have been squarely in the cute zone, my kids have always been a little gross. Of course, all kids are a little gross—all people are a little gross. What’s risky to admit, perhaps, is that I’ve always noticed this grossness in my own kids, and I’ve often been repelled by it. Their cuteness hasn’t always trumped their disgustingness, as seems to be the case for some other parents.
I remember the first time one of my sons vomited. Nothing had prepared me for the force of the stream of hot liquid that spewed forth from that little mouth. For an instant, I stood transfixed by the bizarre sight of my tiny baby turned vomit fountain. But instinct soon kicked in—though not, sadly, the maternal kind. As the arc of vomit splashed onto my arm, I almost struck my son’s head against our kitchen counter, so quickly did I move him away from me.
I have rehashed that moment often—always feeling shame that my impulse was to move my child away from—rather than toward me. (Contrast that with the mother in our baby group who showed up with photos of the diarrhea that her infant had squirted across the room and onto the books on her shelf. Her face lit up with unmistakable pride as she scrolled through numerous shots of shit-strewn books.)
I’ve asked myself what sort of person feels revulsion for her own young, and I never quite come up with a satisfying answer. Yet standing with my arms around my short, muscly son with dirty nails and wiry hair, it occurs to me that I am the sort of mother who feels revulsion, occasionally, for her young children, just as I am also the sort of mother who looks forward to drinking her boys’ night breath for years to come.
The thought puts me at ease with the inevitable end of cute, or at least the end of the universally recognizable kind of cute. It may be at four, or five, at six, or at twenty, but whenever it is, by the time the strange pull of cuteness wears off, it doesn’t matter. We don’t love kids because they’re cute. It just helps us get stuck together. And we don’t love them any less because they’re sometimes revolting. It is a fact of childhood—of life—that we accept with varying amounts of grace.
As my son finally, wordlessly releases me and runs off to rejoin his friends, I feel sure that, no matter what befalls his now silky skin or how bad his armpits wind up smelling, I’m going to want to make him feel better, whatever it is that upsets him so.