1
This morning, while I was braiding her hair, Callie worked on singing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” a song she’s been mastering for several weeks. She gets better at it, and then, by some gauges, she gets worse. Someday soon she’ll be a genius at “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” and because I’ve been watching her incremental progress, I will either quietly delight in the accomplishment or I will nonchalantly say to Ray, “Oh, you haven’t heard her sing that song? She’s been doing that for a while.”
It’s like the jumping she’s been practicing. She spent part of Saturday morning climbing up the ledge on the Fairyland lawn stage and asking me to lift her off, to help her fly to the ground. The space between the proscenium and the grass is about two and a half feet. It doesn’t look like a steep drop to me, until I imagine preparing to jump the same length as my body is tall. I would hesitate if such a leap were before me. Why shouldn’t she hesitate? I didn’t push her to do any more than she was ready to do, but when the three-year-old guests from the birthday party we were attending swarmed the stage and started jumping to the grass below, twenty-two-month-old Callie thought maybe she could jump, too.
She couldn’t jump yet. She actually didn’t understand the physical components of the jump, and so she wanted me to hold her hands while she practiced the motions required for the fall. When she got up her nerve, she took what amounted to an exaggerated step off the ledge. One foot prepared to lead and, as I supported her weight, she mustered her will and allowed the other foot to follow. Soon enough she wanted to take these big steps on her own, and she shunned me, pulling her hands away with determination and walking briskly off the ledge.
Watching this process gave me a new understanding of the concept of taking a giant step. These leaps of faith our lives demand of us. Callie, not even two years old, often has to master her fears and lack of physical knowledge in order to do things she needs to do, like move a cup to her mouth without spilling the contents down her front. She’s got to be even more in control to do the things she wants to do, like leaping off a ledge that’s higher than she is tall. She has no inclination to limit herself, and I try to reduce the limits that might be placed upon her. She could have been stuck back at the bottom of the hill, sitting by the red wagon that none of the older party guests were playing with anymore. Instead, there she was, teaching herself to jump.
This time last year, she was touching grass for the very first time, and that, too, was new territory. We’d taken her to the Fairyland Easter show to see the tap-dancing bunnies—six adults in costume tuxedos and bunny ears tapping their way across the stage, simultaneously delighting and baffling their young audience. After the show, we’d taken Callie behind the main stage’s building to sit on the proscenium that overlooked a wide expanse of lawn. Callie nursed in the relative quiet of that green space, and when she finished, we put her down on the spring grass so she could crawl freely.
Her hand settled down as it might on a blanket, then flew up as if she had touched something offensive, something frightening. She expressed more surprise upon first contact with the grass than she had the whole time the enormous bunnies had been hopping around the stage.
Fairyland is a multi-acre, storybook-focused amusement park, but Callie was never hesitant about encountering an eight-foot-tall, bubble-blowing dragon or working her way into the singing mouth of Willie the Whale. To my daughter, the mysteries of Fairyland seemed par for the course. When she was on the grass, though, her expression suggested that the lawn was prickly and somewhat cruel. She reached up so I could lift her away from the offensive sensation. When I didn’t, she pushed herself beyond her initial discomfort and tested the grass again. The grass seemed to grow soft under her hands, then tickly. Her face moved from horror to delight. Even when she discovered new things about and in the grass, she never fully settled back into horror.
I was thinking of that as I watched Callie teach herself to jump off the ledge. Just last year, for the first time in her ten months on the planet, she was rolling around in grass she’d been at first afraid to touch. I want to consider my daughter’s learning curve in the same ways I might consider my own interactions with the unknowns of the world. How much fuller her experiences are when she reaches toward the unknown! Encounters with people and places and things that are new to her, these are the experiences around which her life will be constructed. Just last year, she was barely crawling. Now she’s pushing herself off the safety of a stable surface and onto the grass far below. Now she is learning to fly.
•
SHE GOT PRETTY GOOD at jumping last Saturday` at Fairyland, but yesterday was Thursday. And Thursday was a whole new day.
We were about to enter the University of San Francisco’s library, where Callie would have to sit quietly with a stack of toys while I gave a poetry reading. The man who’d invited me to read to the USF poetry club is the father of two. When I wrote to say the child care I’d arranged for the afternoon had fallen through, he encouraged me to bring Callie with me.
Usually when I read in the Bay Area, I’ll leave Callie with a family member or a local sitter. If I bring her along, I’ll ask someone positioned at the back of the room—a student or a fellow poet—to hold her for the brief time I’m onstage. My host offered to be such a minder. “I only have boys,” he insisted. “It will be a delight to look after a girl.”
This would be a longer reading than I’d ever done with my daughter in attendance and we’d be inside a library, so her presence would be audible if she started acting up. She’s nearly two, I reasoned. She could self-entertain for a while. Callie would be a good girl if I provided the proper distractions, I reassured myself. Because the behavior of a child is often seen as a reflection of the quality of the mother, I worried that things might go poorly. “Do you need to get your zoomies out before we go inside?” I asked her.
She slithered out of my arms and began running around the two-ton bronze wolves that guarded the USF library. Installed on the campus just six months before our visit, the castings represented the university’s lineage from Iñigo López de Loyola, whose family crest sported a couple of well-fed wolves. But what did Callie care of the history of the statues, the history of the 160-year-old university that hosted us, the history of the 470-year-old Society of Jesus that founded it, the history of Jesus, the history of wolves? All she seemed to care about was what she could do with her own body. Callie patted the hard, cool bronze, sounding her voice into the drum of the wolves’ bellies. “Woof! Woof! Woof!” she cried.
Leading to the wolves was a lawn terraced by a series of concrete ledges, each with a swatch of grass waiting two feet below. After she’d tired of trying to climb up the backs of the colossal wolves, Callie toddled in the direction of the concrete ledges and learned to jump all over again.
First she touched the grass, coming to understand it as an ally. Then she climbed onto a slab of concrete, held my hands, and let me help her fly. Then she walked herself off the ledge, as if horizontal movement could defy gravity. It was like watching a Road Runner cartoon—that brief moment of suspension before the brain kicks in and the body falls. After gravity had won again and again, Callie let go of her dependence on horizontal motion. She launched off both feet at once—she took a little jump and went down with a giggle.
Her learning curve took about thirty minutes. If we do it again later this week, it might take fifteen. Repeated experience collapses the amount of time it takes her to learn new tasks. Who knows how long it will be before Callie simply jumps, without all the preliminaries? When she does, will I remember all the work it took for her to master that basic and necessary skill?
•
THIS MORNING’S “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” went something like, “Inkle inkle hum hum star hum are hum up a hum high high hum star hum hum high.” The rhythm was completely off, which distressed me because one of Callie’s superpowers has been an incredible memory for melodies.
I first realized that she knew the song when I was singing it to her and she began to hum along. I stopped singing because I was shocked to hear her hum so well, but she continued to hum the whole measure, getting the tune right note for note. I was sad to realize that the song was yet another thing she’d learned at the day care we’d enrolled her in a few months before. But I let go of that sadness and enjoyed, instead, my daughter’s musical memory.
Over time, her mastery of the tune grew so well that last week I recorded our duet, mother singing the words and daughter humming along like a harmonica accompanist. She never missed a beat. Her pitch was perfect. Perhaps my excitement was out of proportion to the nature of her accomplishments but, listening to Callie, I suffered the sin of pride.
Katherine Ellison, the author of The Mommy Brain, claims that 73 percent of new mothers express outsized pride in their babies. We do this, she argues, because the survival of our offspring depends on our neurochemical engagement in that child’s success. I know Callie is learning because that is what her brain is tracked to do, but my investment in her demands all my resources. To remain this fully committed, I have to believe in myself as much as I believe in her.
When she wants to sing the song, my little twenty-two-month-old says, “Up a!” and catches my eye.
“Twinkle, twinkle . . .” I begin, and she hums along.
Not long ago, she started adding words. The humming began to be punctuated with an occasional “high” or “star” in addition to “up a” and “inkle,” but always the pitch and the rhythm were right.
But this morning, it fell apart. It was as if all she wanted to do was get at the power words in the song. She must have said “high” five times when working through the lyrics, which messed up the rhythm entirely. I tried to sing the whole piece to help her along, or rather, to help her return to her previous level of mastery, but she covered her mouth with a finger and said, “Shhh. Shhh.” Then she started to sing again, and this time it was even worse. “Inkle inkle ittle high up a high I’m a high inkle are high.” The tune was barely recognizable, though the words were getting clearer every time.
Callie is getting very close to cracking the code of language. Or, I suppose I should say that Callie is getting very close to cracking a code of language, because there will be plenty more mysteries of language that will reveal themselves over time.
Language has always brought, to me, experiences of both triumph and torture.
I was sixteen before I grasped the power of abstract language—riding home from high school with my friend Todd, who had a pet chameleon. We had that in common. When I was four, my family lived in Nigeria while my father was a UNICEF consultant to the Nigerian government, supporting the implementation of basic health systems. The groundskeeper in the park near the compound where we stayed captured chameleons for my sister and me. We used ropes for leashes and treated the creatures as pets. I was telling Todd about how we’d created a sense of intimacy with the reptiles. “Kathryn named them,” I told him, because that was my understanding of the source of their names. “She named one of them after me! It was really sweet of her. They were so cute—we really loved them. Their names were Camille and—”
I stopped midsentence. For the first time, I realized that what I’d perceived as an act of generosity on my sister’s part was simply a play on words. Camille and Leon. How absurd to think my sister, or those captive creatures, cared about me. I wasn’t being honored with a namesake. If anything, the names compared me to a reptile. I’d seen myself at the center of something special that now was nothing but a pun. Language fell apart for me after that. I spent more time parsing phrases, looking for trapdoors. I had moved into a new kind of thinking.
According to the psychologist Jean Piaget, when I kept Camille and Leon as pets my four-year-old thoughts were ruled by my “Preoperational” mind. My sister (eight at the time) was already moving toward “Concrete Operational Thinking.” She could conceive of reverse operational structures: Camille is my sister; this creature is a chameleon; part of this creature’s name sounds like my sister’s. She could move toward a form of inductive logic: Camille is my sister’s name but, since the name Camille also sounds like part of the word chameleon, it is fun that this chameleon is named Camille. Her appreciation of wordplay may not have taken me into account in any intentional way.
At four, according to Piaget, I thought more egocentrically, less aware that there were realities beyond my own perspective, and I focused on one problem at a time, unable to manipulate all the intuitive comprehensions the pun on the word chameleon required. By the time I related the story to Todd, my mode of ideation was moving (albeit somewhat fitfully) toward what Piaget would call the “Formal Operational Stage.” The teacher and blogger Shawn Cornally writes about his efforts to make math more intelligible to high school students, who are going through the same sort of mental developments I was dealing with during my conversation with Todd. In an article titled “Teenagers and Abstract Thinking: Unclear on the Concept?” Cornally writes, “Abstraction is the ability to simultaneously consider multiple states of a system in order to analyze it for patterns, behavior, and predictability.” During adolescence, young people move at different rates into this ability to think abstractly, and the ability to abstractly conceptualize information that was initially received during more concrete phases of intellectual development is sometimes delayed. The information was originally concretely filed in what is essentially a different person’s mind, these theories suggest. Repeating the names of my pet chameleons in the company of another, hearing them as a stranger would hear them, I recognized for the first time that those names represented a variety of perspectives that had, hitherto, been unavailable to me. “I’ve been saying our pet chameleons’ names my whole life, and I’ve never heard them like that before,” I told Todd.
So I will not say that Callie, at twenty-two months, is about to crack all the codes that language has to offer. She’s only just moving out of Piaget’s “Sensorimotor Stage,” when children synthesize their understanding of the world through senses rather than through language. It is, in fact, her rapid accrual of language that will jettison her out of this first stage of human intellectual development and into the next. Or perhaps it’s the movement from one stage to the next that triggers the rapid development of language. Or perhaps Piaget’s theories, as some would argue, aren’t accurate appraisals of cognitive development. Many of Piaget’s notions were established by watching his own children and their friends—hardly a broad or diverse study group—and Piaget himself would admit his theories don’t manifest in all individuals and all cases as an unvarying path. Perhaps these theories haven’t been accurately translated. I discovered, for instance, nearly thirty years after my conversation with Todd and some time after originally writing this essay, that it hadn’t been my sister who named our chameleons. My father named them—with no thought to the possibility that as a result I would formulate understandings both about early childhood development and the security of my relationship with my sister. So, who can say whether or to what degree Piaget’s observations apply? What I can say with certainty is that Callie is beginning to understand the power of language, and she is exercising that power a little more every day.
•
FOR OVER A month she has been able to identify zeros. Any O-shaped object is a “zero.” So the sentence I am writing now, with 100 in the middle, would contain seven zeros. A few weeks after she nailed zero, she began to recognize the number 8. Perhaps it’s the double-0 factor that enabled that. Then, during our trip to Chico last week, she stood in the elevator bay on the second floor of the Hotel Diamond and pointed to the numeral on the lintel. “Two!”
Callie understands that certain symbols are connected to certain sounds. And she can count to two, so that particular number has a conceptual meaning to her as well. She is beginning to pair symbols with words and words with concepts. She’s beginning, in other words, to demonstrate a mind I can recognize.
Tracy Butts, a faculty member at Cal State, Chico, watched Callie while I visited a poetry class. We’d not been with Tracy for more than ten minutes before Callie reached out to invite her embrace. She’s a little diplomatic liaison, going along with me to win hearts and minds. Sometimes the heart and mind that need winning are my own. Leaving her with strangers requires blind optimism on my part, wherein I must assume the people we encounter are intrinsically good. My baby’s willingness to be left with strangers, her willingness to go to strangers, and the goodness I read on these people’s faces when they are holding her—these help me relinquish a great deal of what otherwise might be unmitigated terror.
My host and I walked out of Tracy’s office, and Callie started to cry. It wasn’t a panicked cry. It was more of a grumble. In the same way she’s learning to speak English, her father and I are learning to understand the only language she has full command of right now. I said to my host, “She’s just registering her complaint that I’ve left. She’ll stop crying in a minute,” and before we were fifty yards down the hall, she did.
Later, we learned a student had walked by Tracy’s door wearing a backpack. “Backpack,” Callie said, distracted from the dissatisfaction that had brought her to tears and delighted, instead, by her ability to identify a familiar object. Tracy said she took the baby outside to play on the grass, near the stairs. The blue jays flitted above her, and the baby said, “Bird.” The dogwoods were budding, the azaleas were in full bloom, and the baby wanted to touch all the flowers. She seemed to approve of the energy on the college campus. “Backpack! Backpack! Backpack!” Tracy said she said.
Right now, words are clusters of sound. Or words are labels, sounds that connect to a thing. She hasn’t yet articulated words that represent a state of mind. When I left Tracy’s office, Callie didn’t yell, Stop! I want you to come back! She has baby, boots, brush—I just heard that this morning as I was doing her hair. She has lamb, cat, dog, horse, cow. When she says “woof” rather than “wolf,” she is using the animal’s sound to identify it. Nouns facilitate actions, and the few action words she’s articulated have facilitated nouns. If she says moo, I will hand her the toy cow. She doesn’t need language to identify desire quite yet because a simple naming of an object is enough to get her desires fulfilled. Why say, “I am thirsty,” when simply saying “milk” will solve the problem? Why say anything but “backpack” if that word alone will get her out of an unfamiliar office and into the more familiar embrace of the grass and flowers and stairs on a campus quad?
But new words are creeping in. Hot is one of her favorites when it comes to food, and also to the area around the oven. Shhh means she would like to sing by herself or hear the person on the radio do the singing without her mother’s interference, or it could mean that she’s tired and wants quiet so she can go to sleep more peacefully. Stop means, Don’t tickle me anymore, or Don’t comb my hair, or Don’t put on that lotion: I am physically uncomfortable, and this immediate discomfort is your fault. She is still organizing her thoughts through sensation. Her desire to halt an uncomfortable physical sensation (a touch, or a sound—which scientists might argue is actually just another form of a touch, sound waves entering her ear and touching the proper receptors) has inspired her first articulations of state-of-being words and preliminary action verbs. As these begin to multiply, will she move through the world very differently than she has been doing thus far?
I am devoting more attention than I can ever remember devoting to trying to understand the experiences of another human being, and still I can’t fully inhabit her mind. When she sings “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” does she understand that it is a song about a star far out in space and the great mystery around what that star is and what it does and why it looks like a diamond? She does not. Not now. But one day she will.
How long until that day?
Only a month ago, driving over the MacArthur Maze with the baby in the backseat and her favorite CD on a loop, I grew up a little more. “So- nay- la- latina. So- nay- la- latina,” I sang along, until I realized—with accident-inviting horror—that I’d always sung that verse as a sort of gibberish inflected by my Southern Californian, Spanglish-infused upbringing. What I should have been singing all these years was the French phrase, “Sonnez la matinée”—sounds that had no meaning to me in my youth.
Until yesterday, Callie was basically just singing musical notes, but this morning she was trying to work with language. She’s about to take a flying leap, my girl.
2
THE WORD BOUND means several different things, and when I think of my daughter, I think of all of them, simultaneously and, also, discretely.
To bound means to leap forward, as in, Callie’s development is progressing by leaps and bounds. That definition implies rapid forward motion with upward mobility as part of its intent. If it is likely that something will happen (Callie will learn to speak in full sentences, Callie will learn ballet, Callie will go to college one day), we say, It is bound to happen. But if something is tied up and restricted (say, our financial situation makes it impossible for us to pay her college tuition), we might lament, The poor thing has been root-bound. Just as bound implies exuberant forward movement, it also indicates restraint. It is beyond the bounds of Callie’s imagination to understand that the little star that twinkles in the sky is actually the light from blazing gases that may have been traveling toward us for millions of years. Bound is a limiting value. The edge of possibility. The territorial boundary beyond which we cannot now, and maybe cannot ever, extend. In bounds. Out of bounds. Legal, appropriate, acceptable. Or not.
Though we ought not forget the word’s entanglement with the horrors of perpetual servitude that are a part of our history, to be bound is not necessarily a bad thing. We have leather-bound books in the house. Yesterday, I combed her hair and bound it in Goody® Ouchless® Elastics. To bind something can simply mean to wrap it up: sometimes for safety, sometimes for beauty, sometimes for ease.
I bound myself to your father, and he bound himself to me, and now that we have you, daughter, we are both bound to thee. To be bound up in someone or something is to be focused on that person or thing to the exclusion of all others, which is how I often feel when I am in Callie’s company.
I am a writer. I think about language every day. And now I am bound to someone for whom language is, daily, a new invention. Bound means heading somewhere, as I am often doing with Callie—as I am, perhaps, always doing with Callie. We’re on a plane bound for Vermont, I could say.
•
“DADDY COFFEE,” she said when she saw me with a mug this morning.
“Mommy doesn’t drink coffee, Sweet Pea. This is tea.”
“Mommy tea,” she said, pointing at my steaming mug.
I would find this labeling endearing in any circumstance, but it was particularly interesting to me today because we are not anywhere near Daddy or his coffee. It has been just over a week since our jumping lessons on the Fairyland proscenium. I’ve brought Callie with me to Vermont, and we were eating breakfast in my sister’s South Burlington kitchen while I prepared to drive ninety minutes to talk about nature poetry with college students in a place called Craftsbury Common. We’re 3,012 miles away from our Oakland, California, home, with a relative she’s only met six times in her life. Yet Callie seemed unperturbed by the change in her circumstances, happily identifying the familiar objects in her environment.
During our trip yesterday, we saw the space shuttle Discovery parked on Dulles Airport’s tarmac, awaiting its final transfer to the Smithsonian museum. What dumb luck had us sitting on the right side of the plane to see this slice of history?
The Discovery rested on the back of a modified Boeing 747, looking rather like the smaller of a pair of mating mantises.
Callie flies on at least two airplanes a month. That technology is part of the fabric of her daily life. She can recognize the sound of an airplane as it passes over, differentiating the buzz of a jet plane from the whir of a helicopter. Airplanes are familiar, utilitarian, and nameable. Callie pointed toward the space shuttle that was, even as it sat before us, obsolete. “Airplane,” she said, noting the more familiar Boeing jet first. “Baby airplane,” she said, acknowledging its burden, the Discovery, in the language she had at her disposal.
•
IT WASN’T UNTIL we’d boarded our return flight that I realized it would be the final solo trip I’d take with Callie as a lap child. She’s growing too big. There will be more flights, but the round-trip to Vermont was the last one I will ever make with my daughter sitting in my lap. She’s halfway through her twenty-second month, and her legs reach nearly to the seat back in front of us. Her twenty-five pounds numb my thighs after a while. Another one of the lovely and difficult experiences of motherhood is drawing to an end.
I remembered a woman I sat next to on my way home from an Associated Writing Programs Conference in Chicago. This was a year before I’d thought to invite Callie into my womb. I had not yet constructed myself as a mother, didn’t yet command the expansiveness the role demands. I was flying standby to get back to Ray as quickly as possible, and I was handed the very worst seat on the plane. Beggars can’t be choosers, I told myself, as I was directed to a seat in the last row before the lavatories, between a dour woman in the window seat and a very large woman who was dangling a very large lap child into the aisle.
The boy kicked and squirmed and protested being held for three and a half hours. In an effort to soothe him, the mother fed the boy apple juice and cookies. “Calm down,” she’d tell him. “Stop kicking,” she’d say. The boy kicked some more.
He kicked my calf. He kicked the seat in front of him. He kicked my thigh. He raised his arm to wipe his runny nose and slammed his fist into my arm as he returned it to his side. Sometimes his mother tried to wipe his nose. In response, the boy hit her arm away. The smack of his chubby hand against his mother’s chubby forearm sounded like raw meat slapped down on a butcher’s block.
“We’re taking the train from now on,” the mother told her boy. “You could run around if we were on the train.”
I was merciless toward that woman. I was merciless toward that child. I wanted to throw the sugary apple juice away. I wanted to banish the cookies. I wished they’d come up with the train scheme before I’d had the misfortune of squeezing into their row. When I arrived home, I wrote a letter to the airline complaining about the large woman and her large lap child. When I say I was merciless, I mean to say I was petty, judgmental, self-involved, shortsighted, and cruel.
What I deserve for my lack of mercy is a merciless seatmate on every flight I take with my lap child. This is a world in which some children—particularly children born to certain bodies—are written off as hopeless before they’ve even learned to speak for themselves. My child could easily become the focus of such derision. What I deserve for the times I’ve dismissed other people’s children is blind reciprocity for my disdain. Instead, dumb luck gets us people like the chief of staff of the Northern California VA who sat beside us on our flight home from Vermont. As he eyed my daughter with nostalgic delight, this father of four said, “Babies are evolutionarily programmed to be cute.” By the middle of the flight, Callie was trammeling his slacks under her little shoes, playing with the lights over his head, and sitting on his wife’s lap, opening and shutting the window shade. Somewhere between Cleveland and San Francisco, a flight attendant brought Callie a cookie straight from the first-class oven. “You see?” said the doctor. “If something happens to the parents, babies need to be cute enough that other adults will want to take care of them.”
The word change means: to make or become different, to transform (into a different substance or thing), to move from one phase to another, to arrive at a fresh position. As in, The circumstances may change. As in, The mother must change.
When Callie was about one month old, she would stare into my eyes for long stretches of time. They write love scenes like this into movies. There’s language for the feeling her gaze stirred in me, but the words are insufficient for the magnitude of my experience. I’d changed from a woman who thought very little of babies to a woman who thought of little else.
When she was six months old and would wrap her small hands around the back of my head, pulling me toward her, she would make as if to eat me. “I love you! I love you! I love you!” we would say when kissing her, and it felt as if her kisses were saying that, too. She devoured the third eye on our foreheads. We thought that must be what our kisses felt like to her, our mouths so huge that our little pecks consumed entire portions of her face. Those long gazes in the first month, the consuming kisses in the sixth, they changed me.
They changed my idea of scale. I saw how large I was by comparison. Physically, as well as emotionally. My ideas were larger than they used to be. My fears. They changed my ideas about repetition. Things repeated themselves, and I needed them to. I grew impatient for expressions of love from her. I wanted to experience them again and again, and I understood these repeat-worthy expressions in terms I would not have understood before. I saw patterns in the rest of the world, too. Repetitions I’d not bothered to notice before. I sought patterns in music, in clothing, in literature. Research shows that mothers’ brains light up—of course they light up!—when a baby smiles. But people will tell you—repeatedly—it’s just gas that turns the baby’s mouth up. Faced with these notions, maybe your recurring hunger for these smiles would change. Mine did not.
I changed her diapers as many as eight times in an hour, but even after cleaning up her constant shit, how much I loved her did not change. Or, if it changed, it was only because my love grew stronger in the dispensation of these ministrations. Perhaps she loved me more for having changed her, but perhaps she simply loved the fact that she was changed.
The varied, but simultaneous, perceptions that Callie and I had—our discrete sense of the world necessitated by dramatic discrepancies in our realities (the sizes of our bodies, the amounts and types of work we had to do, the gaps between emotion and logic, the wiring and rewiring of our brains)—meant that all our interactions, though earnest, were changed a little through transmission. The things we were expressing were always incompletely, even inaccurately, received.
Our brains were changing, independently and in concert with each other. What we perceived and how we understood what we perceived was changing as well. The size of a mother’s brain changes during pregnancy and the early stages of motherhood. “We don’t know whether it’s the experience that changes the brain, or the brain that changes experience,” concedes developmental psychologist Pilyoung Kim. Because of advances in neuropsychology, what we understand about early childhood and motherhood is changing.
Because of my changing brain, I understand things differently as well. I am, for one thing, more prepared to interpret—and not to disdain—other people’s potentially flawed communications of their capacities, their fears, and their desires. I am, I believe now, more prepared to be accepting of the humanity in all of us. The biggest difference between the smiting God of the Old Testament and the forgiving God of the New, I’d argue, is that the New Testament God went and had a baby.
When Callie stared into my eyes for those enormous lengths of time, it was because she could not take her eyes off me, though the reasons she could not take her eyes off me had nothing to do with what my old self would have understood as an explosion of love. What was happening was something scientists have dubbed “sticky fixation.” Her vision (at birth, radically different from that of an adult) was controlled mainly by subcortical brain systems like the thalamus and brain stem. These structures drive the infant to focus on the edge of a field of vision where she can better discern what it is she sees. As soon as four weeks after birth, this starts to change. Her visual cortex begins to dominate. By the age of two months, she might develop neural connections in the visual cortex at a rate of up to 1.8 million per second. (They call such rapid neural development synaptic exuberance!) For those few weeks, when her brain changes its centers of vision from the subcortical systems to the visual cortex, there is a contest for control going on between these two parts of her brain. That’s why the baby’s eyes locked. Not because she wanted to look at me, but because she could not yet control the mechanisms by which to look away.
Childhood-development models like the one I referred to when I wrote of Piaget focused on stages of development. In this light, we move from one stage to the next to the next, changing who we are and how we think along the way. This feels like what it means to be a parent. I am so transfixed while watching one thing that I cannot look away, but I must look away. And the moment I look away, everything changes.
It is true, I cannot fully recall who I was before Callie. I was someone before Callie was born, just as Callie’s subcortically dominated vision was vision. But now we are both fundamentally changed. She couldn’t describe what that visual experience was like, just as she won’t be able to describe her life without language. She would have to use language to try to describe her life before language, and already, because her mode of understanding the world is filtered so much more frequently through language, that pursuit is destined to fail.
Challenging this system of discretely chronological development—a system well suited to a linearly organized narrative of our lives—the twentieth century child-development psychologist Daniel Stern believed that children do not develop by changing from one stage to the next, but in overlapping “domains of relatedness.” Once one domain is established, it remains essentially unchanged. Callie still has a thalamus; that hasn’t changed. It still relays, and probably partially processes, sensory signals received by the retina before passing them on to the occipital lobe—what we now call the “vision center” of the brain. Stern said, “Once all domains are available, there is no assurance that any one domain will necessarily claim preponderance during any particular age period. None has a privileged status all of the time.” Perhaps, as this theory suggests, there is a way of understanding change that does not eradicate the previous reality.
This possibility comforts me. The book you are currently reading dwells simultaneously, and nonchronologically, in different stages of my own development, and of Callie’s. When I seem to be focused on a narrative about my daughter’s childhood, I might shift to a memory of an event that happened years before I was born because we live through multiple domains of relation at once. According to my father, the retired pediatrician, “Life is not a fixed experience in which only one variable is at play. We might respond to any number of variables at any given time,” so that a lack of linearity in the articulaton of experience is to be expected. Sometimes one domain is more dominant than others, but once a domain of relation is available, there is no gaurantee it will ever fully cease to influence us.
Child-development experts like Elizabeth Spelke also disagree with Piaget about the moment of the development of ego and empathetic understanding. They believe that from as early as two months, babies develop a sense of self and the correlating sense of others. Ideas of morality and selfhood that are established in infancy, they posit, do not fundamentally change. When I speak to Callie in a stage whisper on the airplane, it is not just mimicry but also empathy that drives her to respond in a stage whisper. Encouragement of that empathetic impulse might be a key to her survival. As the VA chief of staff suggested, babies must appeal to their communities in order not to be cast out.
I think what we are watching when we are watching Callie is a most remarkable and transparent overlaying of domains. Time is nonlinear within the orbit of the child. At once, and not necessarily in chronological order, she is a mewling newborn, an eye-locker, a crawler, a cruiser, a babbler, a talker, a proto-adolescent, a power player, a mortal body—and all this time, she holds inside her the eggs that could make her a mother one day, as she has made me a mother.
She cannot change, though she is change.
•
AFTER WE PUT CALLIE TO BED last night, we could hear her working through “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” She’s getting better with the words. I can now distinctly hear “how I” and “watchu” in addition to “high” and “are.”
I notice all these little things she does, each incremental improvement and devolution in language. There were a few weeks back in her twenty-first month when Ray and I tried to record every word she acquired. I was away on trips that were too densely planned and complicated for me to bring Callie, who wasn’t nursing anymore and no longer needed me in that fundamental way. Ray stayed home with her and kept me connected by sending text messages that reported her progress. “Add turtle,” and I would type turtle into the list of Callie’s new words. “Add light,” “Add wall,” “Sticky.” I missed her while I was gone, though it was nice to be able to open a cabinet without first having to defeat a child lock.
Now that she’s rapidly acquiring language, we don’t record each new word as if we are paupers storing up treasure. We couldn’t keep up. Occasionally people will tell us the rate at which she is expected to acquire new words. The fact of Callie’s acquiring ten to twenty new words each week was once the marvel, but now it is the quality of the acquisition that has me most intrigued. What words is she learning, and why?
When I was in high school, we moved from California to Iowa. I lost language for several months, and thus I lost vision. I’d always written. Poetry was the means by which I made sense of the world. But in Iowa, in that new landscape, I had no command of the word. Everything I wrote from August to April was dreck. I couldn’t describe anything in a convincing way because I could not understand, could not organize my thoughts around, my new world. In California, grass flourishes in the winter. In Iowa, it fades into a dull dormancy.
Coupled with that dislocation, I now understand, my brain was as different to me as my new landscape. I was going on sixteen, pubescent to the highest degree. As a baby—like all healthy girl children ages one through twenty-four months, my own daughter now included—I had experienced the intense estrogen flood that accompanied the initial expansion of my verbal and emotional circuits. In Iowa, the increased floods of estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone that accompanied my sexual maturation were once again reorganizing the language centers of my brain, just at a time when I had lost my facility to familiarly describe my world. I grew angry and frequently combative, but also, I grew more imaginative, wanting to envision the world not as it was, but as I wished it could be. If I thought I was a poet before moving to Iowa, the move into that unfamiliar landscape at that explosive moment of my cognitive development conspired to assure this was true.
To cleave means both to separate and to draw together. Language helps me to cleave.
3
LAST NIGHT we took Callie to a little dinner party at a home in the Mission District. Neil, a poet from the North of England, was visiting his daughter and son-in-law in the city, and he invited us.
Neil has met Callie three times now, making an effort always to visit with me on the most convenient of terms. The first time he met the baby, she was not two months old. He took the BART and the bus from San Francisco to share lunch in our Oakland apartment. I was still so frazzled and tired from the birth and the initial trauma of motherhood that I didn’t remember that the little quiches I’d bought from Farmer Joe’s deli needed to be heated. We ate store-bought salad and cold quiches. Later, when I realized my error, Neil said, “We made do.”
I am a person bound to fumble in social situations, and Callie provides a plausible shield. Last night we were over an hour late to dinner. The baby had been napping, and when she woke, feeding and dressing her turned into a bit of an ordeal. I was focused on all of that and never had a chance to call Neil until it was nearly forty-five minutes later than when I’d said we would be at his daughter’s house. By then Neil had already called to ask after me, but I hadn’t heard the phone.
I said it was because of Callie. I said that I’d turned off my ringer so as not to disturb her nap. I said that since the baby was born, I don’t make appointments on time, and I forget to call people and tell them I’ll be late. Rudeness and discourtesy—I placed it all at Callie’s feet.
No wonder relationships between parents and their children can have so many tensions. I see all of my worst traits coming out more extremely when I am in my daughter’s orbit—disorganization, self-centeredness, flakiness, a tendency toward lateness, messiness, a sense of superiority. So as not to be overwhelmed by all the ways our lives could unfold, I often stay insularly focused on my little family at the expense of other’s experiences of the world. Romantic comedies tout a concept that falling in love makes you want to be a better person. Having a child seems to give me permission to just be myself, only worse. I am bound to behave questionably, now that I’m a mother.
In the home where we dined last night, there lives a pink cockatoo named Pooh. Ray suggested to Neil’s son-in-law, Kai, that this name would confuse Callie because she was potty-training and everything nowadays is about poo. Kai looked at Ray with disdain. Pooh was his bird’s name. What difference did it make to him that our daughter was learning how to use a toilet? The world does not revolve around our daughter. Large portions of the world couldn’t give a damn about her, said Kai’s look.
Pooh is a beautiful bird, but loud when he gets to talking. Callie was by turns enthralled and terrified by Pooh. Pooh spoke recognizable English, and that, in and of itself, was probably quite startling. Add to that the volume at which Pooh spoke, the way Pooh fanned his crest, and the occasional shriek emitted by Pooh. Callie kept her eyes on Pooh the whole time she was in his presence, but she never got close.
At one point Kai placed Pooh on Ray’s arm, and there he perched for quite some time. I have a picture of Pooh and Ray looking quizzically at each other, both of their heads cocked to the side as if to say, Why are you touching me?
After dinner, as Callie started to fade, I changed her into her pajamas so that if she fell asleep in the car on the way home she would already be dressed for bed. The change complete, I brought the baby back to the kitchen. At the head of his table, Kai was engaged in conversation about his years living in Istanbul and his role in the start of the Internet. Suddenly Callie landed on his lap, placed there by Ray. Kai was clearly taken aback. Callie sat there awhile, singing some version of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” in a stage whisper, until Neil told Kai, also in a stage whisper, that he ought to put his hand on the baby’s back, “just in case she decides to topple over.”
I’ve begun to notice patterns in the ways that people interact with our daughter. When she first came into our lives, we had a steady stream of visitors and invitations to visit other people’s homes. It was a little like when a friend has returned from an extended trip abroad. People come together to see pictures and pass around artifacts. In this case, the artifact was a very small person.
The more experienced baby people, like Neil, hold Callie and carry on with their business, talking, drinking, and snacking. The baby might spit up on or around them—they remain unfazed. People who are new to the world of babies, like Kai, seem unable to comprehend how to even hold the child. They square off their shoulders. Employ perfect posture. They hold the baby slightly out from their bodies. They fret over dropping the child, hurting the child, and not supporting the child sufficiently, or they assume an infant has the same physical control as an adult human and provide no support at all.
Once, we didn’t really know how to hold a baby, either. Just that quickly, we have changed from the sort of people who didn’t know what to do with a baby in our arms to the sort of people who tell other people what to do with our baby in theirs.
People ask me how I’m doing these days, and I tell them I’ve never been better. This is true, though it is also not true. There have been times in my life when I have had a greater sense of order, more control over my finances, a better attitude about my body, a more realistic view of my position in the world, and more time to dedicate to self-care. During those periods, too, I imagine I thought I’d mastered my domain.
•
THE FIRST THING I HEARD from Callie’s room this morning were the opening eight bars of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” The words and the music are coming together. She can sing to the tune and maintain the rhythm, and words like “bymond” and “how I under” are clearly recognizable. Now, when she hasn’t mastered a word or its approximation, she fills the space with an imaginative substitute. Perhaps all that listening to the jazz station has been doing something besides keeping her quiet in the backseat. She sounds like I sound in church when I think I know “Amazing Grace” and so don’t open the hymnal, only to discover there’s a fourth verse that most people skip but this congregation relishes. She chooses a word here and there, and then scats the rest.
Ray had already left the apartment when Callie woke, so I got her from her room and we tried the potty. She loves the concept of the potty, likes to sit on the small training potty we keep on the floor next to the toilet in the guest bathroom, but most mornings she isn’t quite patient enough to hold her pee sufficiently long to let it out in the pot. This, too, shall come. I know. And then she will never again be a girl who isn’t potty-trained.
So often I think about these things—the things my daughter once couldn’t do and then worked so hard to do and then never thought about doing again.
I used to be a woman who was wrecked by nostalgia. When I visited California from Iowa or the various East Coast cities where I lived for a decade, the last days of my trips would be overshadowed by nostalgia. Daily, while I walked the streets of San Francisco, I’d grow more and more depressed by the idea of leaving a state I loved. But I can’t do that with a child. With Callie, I am leaving a state I love every day. The grandmother of some kids on the block saw Callie today and said, “When I saw her at Christmastime, she was a little baby in your arms. Now look at her. She’s a girl now. You don’t have a baby anymore.” She is right. It would break my heart if I let it.
Recently, though, Callie has been regressing to her infancy. She can’t seem to eat her morning cereal without assistance. I have to spoon it into her mouth and clean her face when she’s finished, whereas if I tried to touch her spoon a month ago, she’d scream at me and grab it for herself, regardless of how slowly the self-feeding was bound to go. It is as if she herself is caught in a web of nostalgia.
This morning she nursed for the first time in three months. After sitting on the potty, she had a lengthy naked-baby period, refusing to let me dress her, wanting to cuddle in bed with the skin-on-skin contact we used to love, and need, when she was an actual baby. I obliged, wrapped a blanket around her little naked body, and lay down, still in my nightgown.
She tugged at the bodice of the gown, like she did back in her nursing days. I told her there wasn’t any milk there anymore and asked if she wanted some milk from the kitchen. Usually she accepts that surrogate, but not today. Today she kept tugging. Finally, because I thought I would prove my point better through example, I let her suckle. I knew she wouldn’t get anything, and soon enough she’d leave my breasts alone.
After a minute, I unlatched her. “See, there’s nothing there.” Then I looked down. “Holy cow!” I was too stunned to censor the ridiculous pun. “There’s still milk there!”
“Yares till milk ere,” said my mimic as she nuzzled back in.
How could I deny her after my lesson had so clearly failed? There we both were, settled into the morning bed as in her first year, Callie nursing and me dozing in and out of a reverie that often wandered into shock.
How can my body be so good at doing what it needs to do to have a child and simultaneously be so bad? She rested on the belly fat I can’t seem to lose. When I rolled onto my right side, the shoulder that began to dislocate during the pregnancy slipped a bit. Relaxin, the hormone that helped open my pelvis for delivery, blasted my body with laxity. I have to be conscientious about how I move lest I stretch into dislocated pieces.
I dozed again, exhausted by the work it takes to be a mother, and all the while my body was doing the work for me. By golly, this cow still gives milk.
While I was in Craftsbury Common for the Vermont reading, I was taken on a tour of the Sterling College barn. Two sows had begun nursing their piglets just as I arrived. A flurry of nearly fifteen of the little guys snorted and leaped, racing toward the sows and causing a great ruckus. The barn went quiet the moment all the piglets found a teat to nuzzle. Occasionally a youngster would move from one sow to another, finding a new spot in the rack of the multitude. One sow lay on her side, as if sleeping. Her repose reminded me of my own nursing days, how startlingly relaxing the nursing process can be. Perhaps the sleeping is a way to exit the body even further, since nursing sometimes makes you feel as if your body is not, and perhaps never was, your own.
Within about ten minutes, most of the piglets had had their fill. It was like a grade school cafeteria. Food scarfed, one little pig after another ran outside to play. Two lagged behind, looking for more, but the sows were finished as well. The one who had emitted the occasional snort while the piglets were nursing lumbered up—Lord, she was massive—and took her bull-sized body out of the barn. The one who had been sleeping stayed on her side, but rolled over slightly, refusing access to her teats. The piglets stuck around, working an angle on the sow, but their efforts proved futile.
In a different part of the farm, the sheep were calling their lambs. Sheep only have two teats and hopefully don’t have more than two lambs in a season. The lambs found their mothers and butted at their swollen teats with their little lamby heads. Again, I remembered what that felt like, the knocking and squeezing, the urgency of my small, feral beast. The sheep, like the sows, seemed to gauge when enough was enough and moved themselves and the milk source out of their nurslings’ reach.
Like the last piglet and a few of the lambs, Callie cried when I ended our nursing session this morning. But within two minutes, she was jumping on the bed, working her hands up over her head and singing, “Itsy bitsy pider uh uh pout.”
“DOWN,” she said, and waved her arms like an umpire at home plate. “OUT.”
I couldn’t have staged this nostalgic moment better if I’d tried.
Soon after she finished her regression into nursing, she put on her own pants, left the house with me, climbed a ladder at the playground, and then slid down the slide. She was following a girl four months her elder around the play yard, trying to do everything she did. Today was the day she finally taught herself to work up the pesky inclined tube she had never been able to climb all the way through.
We know what we know. We forget what we know. We know what we know again.
•
TO CONCEIVE MEANS to hold something within oneself: possibly an idea, possibly a child, possibly the idea of a child. Before I had fully conceived of her, I had already conceived her. After I conceived her, it took a while for me to conceive how different my life would become.
Conceive has its Latin roots in words that suggest the idea of taking something in and holding it. Sometimes when we say conceive we mean a thing has been expressed in words. Sometimes when we say conceive we mean we understand. We apprehend. To apprehend can suggest both enlightenment and fear. It is also a word we use to say we’ve arrested someone. Once I conceived Callie, I began, quite differently, to apprehend the world.
Callie will be twenty-three months old on Tuesday. When we returned to the apartment, she wanted to read Good Night, Gorilla, but after opening to the first page, instead of letting me read the book, she started speaking in the speedy way one sing-speaks the lyrics of a memorized song: “Winkle inkle ittle star how I wonder what you are up above world high ike a bimond in sky winkle inkle star how I under what you are.” And then, as if that were no big deal—as if she hasn’t been practicing this song every day for a little over a month and this wasn’t the first time she had practically mastered the whole thing, words and rhythm and tune and all—she turned to the next page of Good Night, Gorilla and said, “epinant,” because that was the page where the elephant first appears.
Language is a system of communication we attribute solely to non-infant humans, because we can’t apprehend any other system of speech. When I say we are coming, finally, to “speak the same language,” I am saying I can, at last, conceive my daughter’s world.