Standing in the kitchen drinking water and reading a poorly pixelated printout "Basic Concepts in the Methodology of the Social Sciences" to teach my students tomorrow, I can hear the baby monitor: static, distant singing, the periodic click of the rocking chair coming to rest on the ground, occasional squeaks from the floorboards. Babygorilla sleeps better in his own crib, but when he wakes up he wants to get into our bed, between us. Once there, he'll flop violently onto his side, so completely asleep mid-flop it's like a switch has turned off. He'll lie comatose, the end of one limb touching either of us, slowly rotating until he's at such an odd angle I wake up periodically to make sure the blanket isn't covering his head. But sometimes he gets baby-insomnia and then watch out. No amount of water drunk the night before will stave off dehydration of such magnitude that by morning, my fingers are wrinkled.

The truth is that I drink in those moments stolen out of the norms of baby-parenting strictures and structures we resignedly follow, for all of our ultimate well-being (out of experience: babygorilla needs routine and daily structure to sleep well). But no bedtime routine substitutes for offering one's curved stillness and warmth as nearby comfort, watching the pretty black crescents his eyelashes make over his closed eyes, following the slow sideways droop of baby cheeks as his sleep deepens, while his hand snakes out, mid-sleep, and hangs onto my shirt.

Baby-gorilla, held in his father's arms, stares open-mouthed at me as I towel my wet hair. Something looks different to him; something has struck him. His wide eyes slowly wander over my face with a complex expression: his eyes are soft yet glued to my face, his expression a few shades gentler than shock. He is absorbing something, but what? The steam clouds the air around us; his hair and skin are damp. He has seen me like this before. A smile plays over his face, he comes close to me, but not just to jump into my arms; he needs to continue looking into my face, his eyes luminous with something new (in me? in him?) before he rests his wet face on my shoulder and relaxes into my body, his nose finally running clear.

"How does a child develop into a person who, as a parent, is able to recognize her or his own child? What are the internal processes, the psychic landmarks, of such development? Where is the theory that tracks the development of the child's responsiveness, empathy, and concern, and not just the parent's sufficiency or failure?"

Benjamin, Jessica. "An Outline of Intersubjactivity: The Development of Recognition."
New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 1990, 7 (Suppl.), 33-46

Teetering between babyhood and toddlerhood, littlegorilla sits on my lap breastfeeding, in the wooden rocking chair on which each cousin fed in turn. He sucks, eyes wandering, feet kicking against the slats, then disengages and sits up. He arches his back to slide down my lap and takes a few directionless steps on his thin blue and red wool carpet. Turning back to me, he steps his way beside and then behind the rocking chair, into the corner of the room. Each lurch forward is a trick, a funny game. He laughs at his own joke in going someplace he hasn't been before and that is obviously not intended as a place to walk. I follow him, eying and ignoring the dust, raising the curtain before he can pull on it and bring down the unstable rod, mentally adding to my list of things to do, but outwardly staying calm and receptive to his baby-on-the-margins moment, smiling. He ends up circling the chair clockwise. I sit back down and he climbs back into my lap, and feeds from the other breast. After a few minutes, he disengages, sits up, slides down my lap, and this time steps around the rocking chair counter-clockwise, returning once again to feed, this time from the first breast.

Right breast, clockwise; left breast, counter-clockwise, over and over again.

He has mastered breastfeeding; he has no idea there is such a thing as weaning. Walking is a brand new accomplishment. Making unusual paths is fun and funny; these become circles, which are games. Littlegorilla cuddles and feeds, leaves and comes back, works and rests. He has drawn the circle, and he is inside; he is the drawer and we are the drawn. I let him draw me inside the circle. I let him leave. I let him come back.

The chair rocks, the broken spring a slanted squiggle pointing into the room and outside the circle of the moment. My list of things to do glows in neon letters just outside the circle, turned to their lowest by a dimmer switch (installing which is also on the list), but which I cannot fully turn off. This year, like all new mothers, I have found paths of mother-work and they have become my circles of routine, so that we can have these moments--so there is a chair, there is milk, he is fed and changed, there are curtains keeping out the light--but it is never enough; there is also dust, there are unstable curtain rods. Each moment is also time we don't have together. Around we go, around each other, until the darkness falls and sleep puts an end to it for the day.

Babygorilla blows bubbles on my belly. He bites my knee. He opens his jaw as widely as he can and bears down on my face—biting, sucking—leaving my nose, my mouth, my cheek sopping wet. He pulls my hair. He smacks my cheek. He reaches out for and fingers my earring, pushing my face to the side so he can examine it more closely. He pushes his fingers into my eyeball over my closed eyelid, rolling it over and over again, back and forth. He runs his finger along my eyelashes, pushing up the closed eyelid. He hangs onto my nose, staring up at me. And he feeds. He feeds, he feeds, he feeds, he feeds.

I blow bubbles on Babygorilla’s belly. I put my finger into his warm, soft mouth and sweep both sides, looking for objects he’s placed in there, his eyes round and wondering. I hold him up and wash him clean, directing water around the sink to rinse the remains of his meal into the drain. I clean the fold where the back of his ear meets his head until the cheesy smell of him is gone, looking forward to finding it again by the end of the next day. In the morning I look into his face, seeing its shape superimposed on its yesterday and its tomorrow.

And I feed him. I feed, I feed, I feed, I feed.

I am so small I can barely be seen.
How can this great love be inside me?
''Look at your eyes, they are small but they
see enormous things.'' - Rumi

Five month old babyfish, pudgy feet planted firmly in my lap and sturdy legs splayed, stands slightly higher than my face. Arms spread wide open for balance, he looks down into my face. His full cheeks hang down in wide crescents. His sharply bright baby eyes are blurry up close. His open, smiling mouth hovers over my cheeks, my mouth, my nose. He finally closes his mouth over my mouth, and begins to suck with surprising force, in a savagely loving baby kiss. When he's finished he smiles at me beneficently. The twilight is gathered into the slightly mad gleam of his eyes.

Snail? Guppy? Shark!

I dreamt babyfish was a snail. He was innocent, tiny, placid, bright-eyed, neutral as milk, soft, and glistened. He did a snail-walk around a little red blanket.

In real life, he's all those things, yet he adds up to more than a snail. A while back he began responding when we were talking to him by opening his mouth as wide as possible. We surmised he was trying to talk back, but didn't know he had to make noises on cue, and perhaps thought opening his mouth even wider would do the trick. It was the act of opening in particular that seemed important, and which he would repeat silently and periodically, watching us. This open-closed-open mouth-trick used to make him look like a guppy. Now that he's bigger, it's more of a toothless shark mouth trick. This is partly because his stomach muscles have developed, so the open mouth tends to be accompanied by a slow steady movement up towards our bodies, as though through water, that one associates with a shark heading for its target. Also, he appears to have no neck.

Though he's learned how to baby-speak, babyfish still expresses positive feelings by opening his mouth at us, the wider the better--love, pleasure, happiness, effervescent joy at being alive, feelings of closeness. I love you...and so much, he's saying, that perhaps I shall eat you. And now that he's teething, he does often grip our hands or arms and draw them into his mouth, the softness belying the powerful suction about to engulf us.

And now what shall I write about, given the themes of this blog? The Central Asian rice dish I made for the first time, with chana dal and prunes, courtesy of Mark Bittman, that opened me up to the yummy world of dried fruit steamed into dal and rice? The hilariously awesome movie Untitled we watched a week ago? Canadian election news? None of the above! I'm going to sleep.