I Did Not Know About the ASTONISHING Dignity of Babies
Beauty is terror, mamas.
When I decided to really buckle down and reproduce I did not dream of a pink, wrinkly newborn or even of a coo-ing chubster giggling with delight at peak-a-boo. I dreamt of a precocious 8-year old girl, witty and well dressed with the adult affect of a Wes Anderson child actor.
We would lounge around the house reading books, making art, dancing to vinyl records. I’d take her to a local cafe and explain why she was too young to drink espresso, but, ok, here have a little taste, it’s called a cortado, see I knew you wouldn’t like it.
I saw babyhood as a means to get to a child who talk to, interact with, whose personality I could shape and marvel at. Even as a young girl myself I never went in for mama/baby play. I found girls who wanted baby dolls that wet themselves to be suspect. Strange little tyrants, why, I wondered did they crave such power over something so helpless and boring? Freaks.
Instead, I played SCHOOL. Where I was the cool but firm teacher at the front of the class, instructing my Barbies, stuffed panda, Gumby doll, and 3 Polly Pockets on nuances of Nickelodeon daytime programming.
Even at 9 months pregnant, partially submerged in my tub, I snorted at a page in my Montessori Baby Book that encouraged me to ask my baby for permission to pick her up:
Babies are touched a lot by their caregivers. We touch them when we feed them, change them, and hold them. This provides many opportunities to show the baby respect. We can start by asking permission before handling our baby… We might say, “Hello, baby, may I pick you up?” … If they frown, look away, or just shrink back we can say, “No worries, maybe next time.”
I tried to keep an open mind and assumed that the author was encouraging parents to do this to get them in a certain mindset for when they’re babies become toddlers but as I kept reading, the book was very clear: You should show your baby some respect NOW, you animal.
So now I’m 15 months into being a mom and having a baby and let me tell you this: BABIES ARE FUCKING MINDBLOWING. HAVE YOU MET A BABY?? JESUS CHRIST!! BABIES!!! WHO KNEW?? NOT ME!!!!!
It feels like two days ago my daughter couldn’t control her neck and now she’s greeting the dog every morning, “Hi, doggie!” It’s astounding and it’s not just the remarkable language acquisition or the fact that her brain is growing like a million neurons a minute, it’s the whole BABY VIBE that thrills me.
There is something so poetic and ancient in her gestures.
She knits her brow like Cicero moments before addressing the Roman forum. Thousands of years of Western art has failed to capture the way her hands rest in the air, so lightly, that even gravity has no hold on them. Sometimes she sighs melodically and it’s clear to me that this is the origin of music. In her moments of anguish, it’s like witnessing a shipwreck, a world of wood shattering. Her gaze is beyond time, beyond a calendar, she sees and understands elements of this world that we will never know.
Nothing in our garbage culture prepares you for the reverence you owe your baby. Even those well intentioned Montessori books couldn’t fathom the intellectual and emotional colossus that is your infant. Our culture obscures the true wisdom of babies behind a gauze of dull sentimentality or with outright disdain.
At no point in a human’s life do they observe, decipher, adapt, and conquer so much as a baby. And what do they ask from us? To give them food from our bodies, to press our warmth next to them when they sleep. To allow them the dignity to grow in their own time. And what does this culture say in response? That the babies are ‘needy’ or ‘manipulative’ or that they aren’t doing enough.
My only instinctual notion of my baby’s majestic life force— and I don’t mean majestic like an eagle flapping, I mean majestic like a volcano hurling demonic fire into a riotous ocean to FORGE NEW EARTH — was when I thought about decorating our nursery. I’d browse Pinterest with it’s googly-eyed elephant wall paper, plushy swans, and rainbow garlands and it all felt so juvenile. So treacly and … stupid? Not befitting of the mysterious, pulsating godball that was about to reorganize our entire universe.
Now there are moments where I’m so struck by the beauty in my daughter’s rushing footfalls or in her strange cosmic gaze that I feel afraid.
“Beauty is terror,” Donna Tart writes in her novel, The Secret History. “These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.”
I decorated our nursery with art pieces that made me feel reverent and inspired. It didn’t matter, of course, our nursery is just a glorified hamper. The only decor that can truly match a baby’s grandeur is a mother’s body which is where my daughter spends all her time.
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I can relate to this. We are ill prepared culturally to the realities of children, and the wonder of babies, and how perfect they are as they are.
Oh my god that was beautiful.