Would you like to
smell the jasmine, honey? asks a young mother to the drooling infant. I am waiting in line for coffee by the train
station and the pair has just strolled up behind me. Her child is strapped to the mother’s back
with a creative series of slings and jersey cotton cloths of burgundy’s and
navy blues. He looks soft. They both look soft. I feel like I finally understand the word swaddle. His arms dangle and he squints at the early
morning sky. The mother is tall and pretty with dark hair cut into a bob like
the ones pop stars wore in the nineties.
She wears a fleece that is marketed as technical. Technical, for
that trip to Patagonia she’d always dreamed of, and might still do because she
is young and white and full of healthy vitality. I wonder what she means by jasmine honey
before I see the vine of jasmine growing on a nearby trellis. She leans over to smell it, and then rotates
her body so that her infant can smell the jasmine too. Doesn’t
that smell divine? Di-viiiiiiine?
Mothers are foreign agents.
I think of all the crumpled photographs of my infancy,
folded into binders with cartoon giraffes and shoved between copies of Jules
Verne novels back home. There is one in
which my face is full of delight, my smile pushed to the bounds of my mouth,
and I wonder what it is that was said to me.
My mother is a good mother; I am forever grateful to her for keeping me
alive, for helping to construct the ego I love so much. She was not, however, the type of parent who
learned anything from books on child rearing.
Immersive Parenting in the Digital
Age and Ten Words To Teach Your
Toddler Before They Are Three certainly never graced our bookshelves. Evidence-based methodology is a modern
phenomenon when it comes to raising offspring, and she was far from a modern
mother. There was something intuitive in
her methods, I feel. Her mother passed
away long before I was born. Her father
passed away while she was pregnant with me, so there was not even a secondhand
account to which she could refer. All
she had were her maternal instincts.
When I cried, she picked me up.
When I was quiet, she worried.
She worried often because I was a quiet infant.
Mothers remove a
little of themselves, I think, when their child is born.
The baby giggles, coughs, and stares at me. Babies are always staring at me. Look at
the man with the beard, says the Fleece Mother. Bea-eard.
Two syllables. I do what I always do
when babies stare at me: stick out my tongue and cross my eyes as hard as I
can. The baby does not react, which is
disappointing. Mother smiles at me as if
to say you’re funny but that’s not the
way we are doing things. I turn
away. I can feel the baby staring at me still.
I imagine learning games in the
child’s future: colorful letter magnets on chalkboards, interactive books on
plant identification, and complex games of patty cake involving word
etymology. The mother is careful in the
way she crafts this life. There will Montessori
schools, nannies with doctorates in child psychology, surgery camp, curated play
dates, and deliberately portioned affection.
My mother borrowed advice from the old women in our drafty Communist-era
building on the banks of the Volga River;
the advice was always forthcoming. Wrap
up the child in rough woolen blankets, they said, and place him outside in cold
winter nights. It will improve his
immune system, they said. Always use
rough wool. It is the warmest, they
said, and it will sensitize the nerve endings on his skin. It will make his tactile sense purr. What an adorable child, they said and tugged
on my golden curls; he has your nose.
(This was a kindness, given that my father’s nose is large and
misshapen, but in every way I look exactly like him even now.)
Mothers remind us of
our mortality.
I suppose as a mother you would want to see as much of
yourself as possible in this improbable new life that’s spawned from your
womb. I don’t know. I’ve never been a mother so I cannot describe
the experience to you. This makes me sad
sometimes – that I can never understand the depth of emotion attached to
motherhood. The empathy networks of my
brain don’t even know to exercise themselves.
Maybe this is the problem between mothers and fathers. There are no mirror neurons that fire as I
watch the Fleece Mother in line at the coffee shop and her baby wrapped around
her broad back. She is bouncing up and
down to the delight of the baby. He
giggles and reaches his fists and tiny ankles outward. The baby burps and a thin line of drool drips
from his mouth onto the mother’s boney neck. She does not stop bouncing to clean it up.
 |
| Mother and infant |
Alex is a Creative Writing MFA student at Antioch Universtiy Los Angeles and a Canadian expat living in San Francisco. He writes nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. He sometimes shares his musings and meanderings on his blog.
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