“So, what’s the baby doing now?” comes the voice on the phone — my mother’s. She’s calling for her regular update on what’s new with Amelie, my 4-month-old daughter.
“Right now, what’s she doing?” she demands.
The answer is often disappointing. It falls into one of five categories:
1) She’s sleeping.
2) She’s lying there.
3) She’s getting her diaper changed.
4) She’s eating.
5) She’s spitting up on her mother.
Sometimes it’s a combination of two or three. None are terribly exciting or translate well over the phone, so she probes for details.
“Well, describe it,” she says when I tell her a diaper change is underway.
“You want me describe ‘it’?” I ask her. “I’m not describing ‘it.’ I don’t want to be in the same zip code as ‘it’ and I’m sure not coming up with the words to paint that picture for you. ‘It’ will melt the phone lines.”
It would be like Orson Welles’ broadcast of “War of the Worlds”: “I’m now standing over the alien space craft, still smoldering in the impact crater. Wait a minute! Something appears to be happening. Yes, something is moving down there. Oh my God, it has a death ray! Run!”
It’s not easy being a new grandmother, living vicariously through the telephone, trying to experience all of your granddaughter’s firsts through a receiver in Tampa. Can’t be there for the first spit-up? “Tell me all about it. Did it fly?”
And she’s never satisfied with the answers, almost implying I don’t know what I’m talking about.
“What do you mean she’s sleeping? She can’t still be sleeping. I called five minutes ago. That’s all she ever does. Are you sure? She could be playing dead. Babies do that, you know.”
This from the woman who says when she got pregnant with me (I kid you not about this), she bought a Jane Goodall book on chimpanzee behavior to learn how to raise me. That should clear a lot up for you, especially why I scratch myself and pick bugs out of people’s hair.
I think she expects this baby business is all fun and games with major developments on a daily, if not hourly, basis.
“So is she riding a bike yet?” she asks. “Has she changed a car battery? Has she applied for credit? Can she read a book? Is she cooking? When was the last time she changed her own clothes? Can she fry an egg.”
She’s freakin’ 4 months old!
“Brian,” she says, “if you don’t teach her these things early, she’s never going to learn. I taught you too late how to tie your shoes and look how bad your eye-hand coordination is. You still can’t catch a ball.”
Now she’s taken up sending articles, actually studies, on children, the latest being some report that found babies who develop slower actually end up smarter. Why? Since I didn’t read past the first paragraph, I have no idea.
But I think she is implying that since my “lump” only lies around all day and doesn’t do meaningful things — like reprogram the VCR — she’ll surely be a genius later on in life.
Little Amelie does plenty, though. She drools. Not only that, she drools and then she takes her whole fist, stuffs it in her mouth in some ravenous fury, then removes it so strings of saliva stretch out from hand to mouth like suspension bridge cables or strands of spaghetti. Somehow oblivious to all of this, I go in for a kiss and nearly drown. She thinks this is funny.
She grows hair. After a bath it curls up and looks like a tumbleweed. I go outside and get the rake, and then my wife and I style it. It’s the only way.
She’s started sitting up and howling at the moon like a coyote … a drooling coyote. She laughs. She hoots. She beats her fists and wants to crawl.
But how do you translate that over the phone? Next time I’m telling her she’s taken the keys and going to get a tattoo. Only thing is I know the next thing I hear will be, “Well, describe it.”