Mar
13
Ask Your Body
Filed Under Obliques
This post is based on a prompt from the Oblique Strategies (1st Edition) developed by Brain Eno and Peter Schmidt.
Ask my body? My body tells me I have a cold.
One of the the little surprises about being a parent is the dramatic increase in communicable diseases. This is one of the things no one tells you. Those without children may be shocked to learn that there is anything someone won’t tell you before the day arrives. Everyone has advice. Sleeping through the night, soothing croup, teething, whatever. You get a lot of advice.
At first, the advice is welcome, especially during the pregnancy. After all, this all you want to talk about for awhile. You’re excited. This is the most exciting time of your life. Nine months of anticipation, wondering what little person will emerge from your wife’s womb.
But it gets old. Eventually, you will tire of your neighbor’s aunt rattling off a home-brew concoction for baby shampoo. You nod and smile, but they know you’re not really listening. At this point in the cycle, you get the familiar admonishment: “You’re life is going to change”. A shit-eating grin usually follows.
By the time the nine months rolls around, most people think they know what they’re in for. But they’re wrong. You don’t really understand a three-hour feeding schedule or the compulsion to track daily bowel movements until you’ve been through it. But you figure it out. And then you forget.
Our son is almost a year old and I can hardly remember what it was like in that zombie-like state of fresh parenthood. It’s already hard for me to remember what he was like those first few months, tiny and helpless. Now he’s a fearless brute of a baby, continually grabbing for the dogs’ collars and climbing under tables. And, thankfully, sleeping through the night.
Sometimes I get glimpses of just how small he still is. When I’m changing his diaper, he will sometimes curl his legs in a way that would require me to dislocate hips and tear ACLs. It’s the fetal pose you see in the doctor’s office posters. He curls this way naturally, his body not yet deformed by adulthood. At these times I see how far away from growing up he is.
I think of my own body. In my head, I will always remain twenty-four. My body tells a different tale. I’m fitter than I was was a few years ago, but a much uglier beast than in high school. Hairier, and increasingly odder places. Teeth a little more yellow. Knuckles cracked from winter wind. A shoulder I can’t seem to keep in socket. Bad habits and misspent youth have all marked up this form of mine. I’m still a young man, not yet into my middle thirties. But I understand where my grandfather is coming from when he remarks about my son’s tiny white teeth.
Our pediatrician tells us that a baby in day care will get six to twelve illnesses in the first year. What he–and no one else–bothers to mention is that this means the parents will catch the very same six to twelve illnesses. It’s impossible to be in close contact with a little one and not catch the bug of the month. I hadn’t had a cold in two years prior to our son’s birth. Since then, I’ve had three. And somehow, Mono–a disease I thought you only caught from making out with girls in study hall.
So today, I cannot breathe through my nose or taste anything. The same old cold we all have throughout our lives. This is what my body tells me today. Tomorrow I will feel a little better and by the end of the weekend I will be back to normal. I will forget what it’s like to have a cold, much like I’ve forgotten how it was to survive on four hours of sleep in the early days. Next month, I will get this cold again.
I think of our little boy. Indeed, he’s less of a baby and more of a boy now. Small and perfect, he learns something about his body nearly every day. How to clap, how to wave, how to stand. We watch him grow, amazed at his journey. Every day we get a little glimpse of the little person he’s growing into. And we can’t wait for more. But in another way, I think of his little body and want him to stay this way forever. Perfect and fresh, unmarked and unhurt by the big world out there.
Your life is going to change, they said. This kind of thing must have been what they meant.
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