The Night Babies
It happens nearly every night. I can't help it.
In dreamland, the babies appear. One per evening. It's a familiar weight being held in my arms. Milky faces, even though I do not nurse them. These babies, with full diapers and all of their need, are not mine. While I sleep, I pack them around, cradled in one arm, while I help other young children who need my attention. I am attentive, constantly trying to catch up and keep up, and these babies are like a recognized artificial appendage. I can cook with them in arm, clean up something-- in my dreams, there's always an endless confusing mess of things to sort through and organize before the inevitable demands of child-need rise to a crescendo of sorts.
Sometimes, the babies are sticky with everything, and I'm trying to get them cleaned and changed but another three or four children in my charge are distracting me and become more important. The weight of the loaded diaper in my hand feels palpable. I NEED to change this baby, but children are scampering all over a house full of nooks and crannies. the perfect house for kids of their age, but a struggle for someone of mine.
Early this year, I was walking home with a young adult person who, years ago, might have called me 'Nanny' if we were in a British movie set in the Edwardian Era. But it was January 2020 and she was walking me home from a lunch date at a Thai restaurant. She was back from college, her junior year, telling me about how she and her partner had finished their capstone project, which was a mathematical modeling program of how disease spreads through differing communities, from households all the way to states and countries, her senior thesis complete and oh-so-prescient. We came across a mother and baby on the way back to my house and when I commented on what a cutie that new child was, the mother asked the oft-rhetorical question posed by new parents: "You want to take her?" We talked about the possibility of my doing some baby-nanny care for them, which would be thwarted a couple days later by my reinjuring a ligament and hobbling around and being unfit to carry such precious cargo safely. It was a daydream dashed; the illusive fragrance of fresh baby smell had wafted under my nose and then was gone. My young college friend had actually been the primary selling point, talking me up to this neighbor mother, and so I direct your attention back to her...
I held that girl, now 22, as a baby, the first day she was born. She visited our newborn son on the same; she was nine. Her mother had come to visit earlier that day because she was leaving town for work. Her mother is the woman who showed me what it means to be a mother, and their family is so close to my heart. She and I met when her eldest was 17 months and too smart to stay with the younger toddler group. That was back in 1996, perhaps. The mother helped me to expand my horizons. Even without my having had a college education, she saw that I read and studied and wanted to provide something real, experiential, to the older toddlers in my charge.
It was the tape triangle, square, and circle I had put on the carpet. It was the open-ended art experiences, simply providing supplies and letting the kids go for it. The mother had her masters in teaching (she would later earn her doctorate) and could see where I was going with this mode of discovery. I remember myself, going to the library in downtown Honolulu and being able to fingerpaint for the first time, then blowing bubbles out of a plastic pipe near Iolani Palace after we'd left. I never forgot fingerpainting from when I was so small, barely four. I knew that the children would forget most of my time with them, but it still mattered. Painting shaving cream on the tables, with brushes (it actually served to clean the tables as well), and plastic cars running through the foam, offsetting the soft white peaks with the amber colored-wood below. Storytimes where the children watched our hands as we sang songs, and tried to replicate our movements and words. (A huge thanks to Joan from the Multnomah County Library's mobile storytime--- between she and my drama classes in high school, I can read aloud a children's book like a pro.)
The children, 20-30 months, could sort their dishes and pile them up by type. Toddlers LOVE to differentiate by type--it's kind of their thing. Positive feedback encouraged their work, and it was wonderful when they decided "I do it!", feeling competent in their abilites to put their plate, cup, bowl and silverware where it needed to go. Kitchen staff marveled at this, but really, it was age-appropriate teaching: they matched like with like and were satisfied with the result.
Now I have a teen who wants to negotiate everything. The dishes are placed haphazardly in the sink after meals; the silverware put away in the entirely wrong places in a hurry to get back online with friends. (Sorry, kid, the measuring spoons do not go with the coffee spoons, even if you argue they are all essentially the same thing.) Babies and teens have a lot in common: both are smart, testing their own abilities in new situations; babies try to sit up, they search faces for familiarity and are constantly taking in their surroundings while being fascinated with the glory of the basic things we take for granted, like their own hands. Teens, by the same token, are trying to figure out how to be in the world, searching for social cues and belonging, trying to make sense of algebra and physical science and why people think the ways they do. Sussing out what they owe to their parents, community, and figuring out what is reasonably owed back to them. This is why, when things are misplaced in the silverware drawer, I turn it into a version of Highlights magazine "What's Wrong With This Picture?" game, asking him to critically look at his work and then correct it. If his Humanities teacher can ask him to do that for an essay, well then, this sort of guidance must be instructive.
Right?
Maybe I'm dreaming of babies because they are a part of the past. They are easier in some ways, harder in some. Or maybe it's just a natural longing for me, to hold and nuzzle a little pair of pajamas filled with soft hair and rubbery baby skin and so much promise. Maybe my dreams are filling in for all the hugs and kisses I have in reserve, but sensitively hold back because a mother's love has the potential to be overwhelming. Kiddo is not cold or aloof, he will gladly receive a hug from Joe or I. We ask first, because we also have the job of teaching consent, and that starts at home. Babies are like spider monkeys, hanging off of you and the hug is what keeps them from falling; teens are fine standing on their own strength, thank you very much.
Last night, I dreamt of that family who taught me how to really love. In my dream, I worked in my neighborhood-- the one I worked in for years before I ended up falling in love with a man on Flanders Street and living here in this house. I was going from client to client, caring for people's children, checking in on families I've known over the years. Perhaps this "dream job" doesn't pay, but it has its rewards. Perhaps it's a walk down memory lane, hypersocial contact during a pandemic, my brain's own therapy to address this time of quasi-isolation. Whatever it may be, the Night Babies are welcome to haunt my dreams any evening.
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