Baby Archives - Maggie InkMaggie Ink

To Everest: Now you are two

August 13, 2016

I’ve seen you so often, but every day I catch myself marveling at the sight of you. You are part-boy, part-pony. Every morning you burst out of the room, spring-loaded with the energy of a horse emerging from a corral.

I remember two years ago at the hospital, holding you during one of our first days together. We didn’t know each other then. Not really. I stared at you that day, and I wondered who you were – who you would become.

Well, every day you reveal a little more, and I am delighted with each discovery.

You are curious. You want to know every color, every feeling, every animal. You try to read all the books, and sometimes you surround yourself with big stacks of cookbooks and Baby Lit books and travel guides and picture books, and you want to devour them all. It makes me so happy.

You are hilarious. You play jokes, like surprising me by hopping out from behind a door or forcing me to sniff your stinky feet. If I don’t laugh, you laugh anyway and insist, “Funny.” You always ask for a sip of my coffee, wait a beat, then collapse in giggles. That joke slays you.

You have an endless capacity for singing “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider.” When I sing about the wheels on the bus, you joyfully chime in with “All through the town!”

Your mind is a sponge right now, and I am charmed by the incorrect words you’ve acquired for everyday objects. Telephones are hellos, a bridge is an uppy-downy, and mountains are “the big.”

You scale the furniture and leap up the stairs and somersault across the floor and hop hop hop all over the place and run circles around the dinner table. We gave up baby gates months ago, because it’s useless to try to contain you. When we go outside, you shoot me a sideways look and say, “I run?” – then you’re off, sprinting down the road. I’m exhausted and awed by it in equal measure. I love your energy for life and your sheer physicality, and I hope I can keep up with you in the years to come.

You have no fear, so I hold it all for the both of us.

You love airplanes and elephants, monkeys and watermelon. You are on a desperate mission to hug all cats. And I can say from personal experience, your hugs are the greatest. My favorite thing is when you hold my face to carefully kiss my forehead, my nose, my chin, and both cheeks.

Most of all, you are kind. I’m overwhelmed by your generosity, patience, and compassion. You are gentle with animals. You wait your turn with toys. When you’re playing with a ball and another kid swipes it, you shrug and move on to something else. If you have two crackers, you always try to feed me first. You talk to everyone, including the homeless people at the library – especially the homeless people at the library – and it does my heart good to see all the smiles you leave in your wake.

You are just two, but you have already made my life richer, fuller, better. I still don’t know exactly who you’ll be yet, only that I’m so happy you’re mine.

If my baby made a mixtape

November 20, 2015

My 15-month-old son is really into music. But despite my best efforts to indoctrinate him with Ramones and the Clash, New Order and the Cure, R.E.M. and Sonic Youth, he insists on being his own person with his own particular preferences. The nerve!

His musical palate right now is situated somewhere between Burning Man and an episode of “Scandal.” I don’t know how that’s going to shake out as he grows up, but in this very moment, his taste rocks.

Here are some of his favorite jams:

Don’t You Worry Bout a Thing • Stevie Wonder

Tell Me Something Good • Chaka Khan and Rufus

Take It As It Comes • J. Roddy Walston & the Business

i • Kendrick Lamar

Alright Alright Alright • Mungo Jerry

Lovely Day • Bill Withers

Janglin • Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros

Friend of the Devil • Grateful Dead

I Love You and Buddha Too • Mason Jennings

6AM • Fitz and the Tantrums

That last one is no surprise, as E is up at 6 a.m. EVERY DAMN DAY.

We are a family

March 4, 2015

“When you realize the value of all life, you dwell less on what is past and concentrate more on the preservation of the future.” — Dian Fossey, Gorillas in the Mist

Dear Everest,

Once, on drizzly Rwandan morning when the Virungas were swathed with mist as fine as cotton candy, I hiked into the mountains to follow a family of mountain gorillas. To get there, I sliced through tangles of vines and branches with a long, solid machete. When the mountain got particularly steep and slippery, I used the machete to carve steps into the mud. Finally, after a few hours and a lot of sweat, I reached the gorillas.

They were remarkable. Truly. Gorillas aren’t aggressive unless threatened, and I think this group knew they were among friends. The silverback walked past me and put his enormous hand on my shoulder before moving on. He paused at the edge of a clearing and surveyed the landscape.

There were other adult gorillas. Some male, some female, although I didn’t really know how to tell the difference. They were gentle and kind. And there were babies, joyful baby gorillas, who plucked ripe berries from the bushes, scratched their heads, and awkwardly tried to swing from one tree to another.

I watched as the gorillas nurtured their young, the babies riding on their mothers’ backs or nestled in the crook of an arm.

One of the adult gorillas flattened some of the foliage into a nest and placed her baby there to rest. When the baby was good and comfortable, the mama perched nearby where she could keep watch. They were so much like humans.

Even so, I remember thinking, “Nope. Not me.” I didn’t think I could ever care for a child in that way. I didn’t have that capacity for selflessness, and when I searched within myself, I found zero maternal instinct. I was a woman who wielded a machete in the mountains, after all, not the type to nurture anyone.

Even when you arrived, I was unsure about this arrangement. I spent the first few months struggling to figure out how to make room in my life for a baby. Your bassinet was shoved between my bed and my nightstand, and it always felt like I was trying to wedge you into someplace you didn’t belong. Someone said to me, “I guess you’re done traveling now,” and I wondered if that was true, if my world was shrunken and small now.

But somewhere along the way, my world didn’t just stretch to accommodate you — you completely expanded it.

In fact, I suspect now that everything I’ve ever experienced, every skydive and every sunset, every place I’ve ever been, every trail I’ve ever walked, it was all leading me to you. And everything I have yet to experience, it already seems bigger and brighter because I’ll be experiencing it for two.

I get it now, this primal drive to care for another being. All I want to do is build a nest for you, a place to keep you safe and warm while I stand watch. We are a family.

Love, Mama

2014: The year I was gutted

December 31, 2014

Photo by peddhapati.

My 2014 can be summed up with one fact: It took five months for my c-section incision to heal, a wound that should have closed in less than 6 weeks.

I’m not saying this to inspire sympathy or to have a conversation about childbirth in America. Just know that when I say I spent a good deal of my year split wide open, that’s not hyperbole.

There was one moment when I was at home, wildly trying to juggle my crying newborn during a conference call for work. I was bouncing the baby on my hip, walking past the bathroom, and I happened to look in the mirror just as my robe fell open. I saw the lipstick red slash of my incision reflected back at me, and I thought, “I am so broken. So very, very broken.” The idea that I might never be fixed, that my life might never again have a sense of normalcy, was terrible and frightening.

Many days I wondered when I would be whole again; if I would be whole again. The unknown is such a vulnerable place to reside.

Don’t get me wrong — it wasn’t a bad year. I had a lot of achievements: I finished my master’s degree, and I hit a few professional goals. I gave birth to a wild, funny boy, who has wispy hair and gentle cow eyes. I have a husband who inspires me on a daily basis and friends who are generous with their love. Many days were filled with pancakes, dance parties when the baby wouldn’t sleep, sunshine, fairy lights, a new blue dress or two. It was actually an extraordinary year.

This face.

But underscoring all the good things was a new and overwhelming feeling of helplessness — it seemed every time I felt like I was in the driver’s seat, the “service engine” light popped on in the car.

So 2014 was challenging. This was a year of allowing buried things to surface and giving air to raw skin. Watching old wounds heal and waiting for scar tissue to form. Of making peace when things fell beyond my control. Of learning patience. Of being.

Here’s to achieving more balance in 2015.