The Ultimate Invasion

How little was I prepared for the small bundle that was presented to me after twelve hours of the most strange, unrelenting pain. Little did I know about the needs of babies or how to pacify them when they cried. And how much less did I ever guess that after this first one that I would go on to have five more of these strange aliens invading my body and invading my life: changing it so utterly that now I simply can’t imagine any event in my current life without weighing how I will fit that event around my children. That first alien won me over, simply through the power of his eyes. They were initially a very dark blue, with wide black pupils. Apparently, the proportions of a baby’s face and the colour of their eyes are both designed for this specific function: to so deeply charm you and claim you into dovetailing all your actions to their needs. Add this to the special cries of the newborn. Over time, you learn to differentiate between the cry that means ‘I’m hungry,’ and the cry that means ‘I’m uncomfortable, change me,’ as well as the cry that just means, ‘I want to be picked up and cuddled close to you.’ ‘The first baby,’ my mother used to say, ‘is the one you do your learning on.’ What she didn’t add, is that each subsequent one makes you adjust that learning. There is no one-size-fits-all advice that you can give a new mother – despite all the many How-To books that there are, or theorists that each generation throws up. In my mother’s day, mums turned to the venerable Doctor Spock for help and advice (although, as a child, I often wondered just how much a space-hopping Vulcan could know about earth children). You don’t get a precise instruction manual with your first-born. When you leave the hospital with the small bundle of flesh enclosed in a nappy, a popper vest, a baby-gro, a hat, a shawl: all of this wedged tightly into a seemingly huge rocky-tot cum car-seat, you are slightly panicked. That panic rises when you are back in the sitting-room of your home. There you are: two parents perched on the edge of the sofa gazing at this tiny sleeping intruder that fell asleep in the said car-seat plonked in the middle of the floor. Here you all are now: two have become three and you have some inkling that life will never be the same again. One thing’s for sure: you can’t send this small alien back. These aliens are cunning: not only do they have their own language and strange customs that defy interpretation; they seem to come with inbuilt testing mechanisms: designed to try their carers to the very maximum. You discover the real meaning of colic, a condition that you thought was something that you found in sickly babies in some of those books by Charles Dickens. The actual reality is hours and hours of incessant crying, from which there is no escape. Colic really means trying to feed, change and amuse, none of which seems to work. It’s treading up and down a red hall carpet for hours, wearing the brown weft threads in the centre out, because that’s the only thing which brings the crying down to a more acceptable level. It is six weeks of endurance, during which both parents become as fractious as the child. Trying to discover the answer becomes a great quest, something like searching for Alchemical gold: gripe water, fennel water. And then finally comes a breakthrough: the one thing that you didn’t want your child to have, because you’d been given to believe that they were unhealthy – a soother. Quite simply something to suck on. The demented crying finally stops – the parents laugh manically at each other as they slither in relief to the floor: ‘It was so simple, why did nobody tell us?’ The baby (and the parent) finally has a first quiet night full of sleep, which eventually turns into a week, a month. All too soon the frantic hall-pacing of the parents has been replaced by the wobbly toddles of a two year old. Fifteen years later, and I am no closer to figuring out this alien invader. Nappies, soothers and bottles have been replaces by trendy jeans, guitars and games consoles. The language is still not easy to decipher. Mumbles have replaced gurgles, crying for attention has become wheedling – mostly for extra money, and as for coded words and phrases, I have given up trying to follow his shorthand or even what passes for texts these days. From a small nine pound (or two kilo) bundle of flesh, I now have a lanky beanpole son, who passed my five feet and six inches last year, with bigger feet and wider eyes. I know he hasn’t finished his growing yet. A quick look in the fridge at the decimated cheese-box and the empty sliced pan loaf wrapper lets me know that he knows how to fill those hollow legs of his. His interest in keeping up to date with studies in school, well that is a hard spark to kindle and keep alive. Perhaps some day he will be a parent himself and realise the value I place on his education. I often wonder about his future. What sort of life he will have? How far he will travel, in the physical world and in his imagined life? Will he ever have the opportunity to enjoy space travel, in the way that my generation enjoyed becoming the ‘Ryanair’ generation – able to fly to European destinations at the drop of a hat? And if he does get into space, will there be any other species out there that would recognise the tribulations of raising young that have often seemed to be almost out of our ken, almost alien? I believe that any parent, anywhere, would recognise that feeling – and no, it never goes away. 2009-05-16T15:54:47-04:00 false false 729

barbara-smith-the-ultimate-invasion

12578

How little was I prepared for the small bundle that was presented to me after twelve hours of the most strange, unrelenting pain. Little did I know about the needs of babies or how to pacify them when they cried. And how much less did I ever guess that after this first one that I would go on to have five more of these strange aliens invading my body and invading my life: changing it so utterly that now I simply can’t imagine any event in my current life without weighing how I will fit that event around my children. That first alien won me over, simply through the power of his eyes. They were initially a very dark blue, with wide black pupils. Apparently, the proportions of a baby’s face and the colour of their eyes are both designed for this specific function: to so deeply charm you and claim you into dovetailing all your actions to their needs. Add this to the special cries of the newborn. Over time, you learn to differentiate between the cry that means ‘I’m hungry,’ and the cry that means ‘I’m uncomfortable, change me,’ as well as the cry that just means, ‘I want to be picked up and cuddled close to you.’ ‘The first baby,’ my mother used to say, ‘is the one you do your learning on.’ What she didn’t add, is that each subsequent one makes you adjust that learning. There is no one-size-fits-all advice that you can give a new mother – despite all the many How-To books that there are, or theorists that each generation throws up. In my mother’s day, mums turned to the venerable Doctor Spock for help and advice (although, as a child, I often wondered just how much a space-hopping Vulcan could know about earth children). You don’t get a precise instruction manual with your first-born. When you leave the hospital with the small bundle of flesh enclosed in a nappy, a popper vest, a baby-gro, a hat, a shawl: all of this wedged tightly into a seemingly huge rocky-tot cum car-seat, you are slightly panicked. That panic rises when you are back in the sitting-room of your home. There you are: two parents perched on the edge of the sofa gazing at this tiny sleeping intruder that fell asleep in the said car-seat plonked in the middle of the floor. Here you all are now: two have become three and you have some inkling that life will never be the same again. One thing’s for sure: you can’t send this small alien back. These aliens are cunning: not only do they have their own language and strange customs that defy interpretation; they seem to come with inbuilt testing mechanisms: designed to try their carers to the very maximum. You discover the real meaning of colic, a condition that you thought was something that you found in sickly babies in some of those books by Charles Dickens. The actual reality is hours and hours of incessant crying, from which there is no escape. Colic really means trying to feed, change and amuse, none of which seems to work. It’s treading up and down a red hall carpet for hours, wearing the brown weft threads in the centre out, because that’s the only thing which brings the crying down to a more acceptable level. It is six weeks of endurance, during which both parents become as fractious as the child. Trying to discover the answer becomes a great quest, something like searching for Alchemical gold: gripe water, fennel water. And then finally comes a breakthrough: the one thing that you didn’t want your child to have, because you’d been given to believe that they were unhealthy – a soother. Quite simply something to suck on. The demented crying finally stops – the parents laugh manically at each other as they slither in relief to the floor: ‘It was so simple, why did nobody tell us?’ The baby (and the parent) finally has a first quiet night full of sleep, which eventually turns into a week, a month. All too soon the frantic hall-pacing of the parents has been replaced by the wobbly toddles of a two year old. Fifteen years later, and I am no closer to figuring out this alien invader. Nappies, soothers and bottles have been replaces by trendy jeans, guitars and games consoles. The language is still not easy to decipher. Mumbles have replaced gurgles, crying for attention has become wheedling – mostly for extra money, and as for coded words and phrases, I have given up trying to follow his shorthand or even what passes for texts these days. From a small nine pound (or two kilo) bundle of flesh, I now have a lanky beanpole son, who passed my five feet and six inches last year, with bigger feet and wider eyes. I know he hasn’t finished his growing yet. A quick look in the fridge at the decimated cheese-box and the empty sliced pan loaf wrapper lets me know that he knows how to fill those hollow legs of his. His interest in keeping up to date with studies in school, well that is a hard spark to kindle and keep alive. Perhaps some day he will be a parent himself and realise the value I place on his education. I often wonder about his future. What sort of life he will have? How far he will travel, in the physical world and in his imagined life? Will he ever have the opportunity to enjoy space travel, in the way that my generation enjoyed becoming the ‘Ryanair’ generation – able to fly to European destinations at the drop of a hat? And if he does get into space, will there be any other species out there that would recognise the tribulations of raising young that have often seemed to be almost out of our ken, almost alien? I believe that any parent, anywhere, would recognise that feeling – and no, it never goes away.

How little was I prepared for the small bundle that was presented to me after twelve hours of the most strange, unrelenting pain. Little did I know about the needs of babies or how to pacify them when they cried. And how much less did I ever guess that after this first one that I would go on to have five more of these strange aliens invading my body and invading my life: changing it so utterly that now I simply can’t imagine any event in my current life without weighing how I will fit that event around my children. That first alien won me over, simply through the power of his eyes. They were initially a very dark blue, with wide black pupils. Apparently, the proportions of a baby’s face and the colour of their eyes are both designed for this specific function: to so deeply charm you and claim you into dovetailing all your actions to their needs. Add this to the special cries of the newborn. Over time, you learn to differentiate between the cry that means ‘I’m hungry,’ and the cry that means ‘I’m uncomfortable, change me,’ as well as the cry that just means, ‘I want to be picked up and cuddled close to you.’ ‘The first baby,’ my mother used to say, ‘is the one you do your learning on.’ What she didn’t add, is that each subsequent one makes you adjust that learning. There is no one-size-fits-all advice that you can give a new mother – despite all the many How-To books that there are, or theorists that each generation throws up. In my mother’s day, mums turned to the venerable Doctor Spock for help and advice (although, as a child, I often wondered just how much a space-hopping Vulcan could know about earth children). You don’t get a precise instruction manual with your first-born. When you leave the hospital with the small bundle of flesh enclosed in a nappy, a popper vest, a baby-gro, a hat, a shawl: all of this wedged tightly into a seemingly huge rocky-tot cum car-seat, you are slightly panicked. That panic rises when you are back in the sitting-room of your home. There you are: two parents perched on the edge of the sofa gazing at this tiny sleeping intruder that fell asleep in the said car-seat plonked in the middle of the floor. Here you all are now: two have become three and you have some inkling that life will never be the same again. One thing’s for sure: you can’t send this small alien back. These aliens are cunning: not only do they have their own language and strange customs that defy interpretation; they seem to come with inbuilt testing mechanisms: designed to try their carers to the very maximum. You discover the real meaning of colic, a condition that you thought was something that you found in sickly babies in some of those books by Charles Dickens. The actual reality is hours and hours of incessant crying, from which there is no escape. Colic really means trying to feed, change and amuse, none of which seems to work. It’s treading up and down a red hall carpet for hours, wearing the brown weft threads in the centre out, because that’s the only thing which brings the crying down to a more acceptable level. It is six weeks of endurance, during which both parents become as fractious as the child. Trying to discover the answer becomes a great quest, something like searching for Alchemical gold: gripe water, fennel water. And then finally comes a breakthrough: the one thing that you didn’t want your child to have, because you’d been given to believe that they were unhealthy – a soother. Quite simply something to suck on. The demented crying finally stops – the parents laugh manically at each other as they slither in relief to the floor: ‘It was so simple, why did nobody tell us?’ The baby (and the parent) finally has a first quiet night full of sleep, which eventually turns into a week, a month. All too soon the frantic hall-pacing of the parents has been replaced by the wobbly toddles of a two year old. Fifteen years later, and I am no closer to figuring out this alien invader. Nappies, soothers and bottles have been replaces by trendy jeans, guitars and games consoles. The language is still not easy to decipher. Mumbles have replaced gurgles, crying for attention has become wheedling – mostly for extra money, and as for coded words and phrases, I have given up trying to follow his shorthand or even what passes for texts these days. From a small nine pound (or two kilo) bundle of flesh, I now have a lanky beanpole son, who passed my five feet and six inches last year, with bigger feet and wider eyes. I know he hasn’t finished his growing yet. A quick look in the fridge at the decimated cheese-box and the empty sliced pan loaf wrapper lets me know that he knows how to fill those hollow legs of his. His interest in keeping up to date with studies in school, well that is a hard spark to kindle and keep alive. Perhaps some day he will be a parent himself and realise the value I place on his education. I often wonder about his future. What sort of life he will have? How far he will travel, in the physical world and in his imagined life? Will he ever have the opportunity to enjoy space travel, in the way that my generation enjoyed becoming the ‘Ryanair’ generation – able to fly to European destinations at the drop of a hat? And if he does get into space, will there be any other species out there that would recognise the tribulations of raising young that have often seemed to be almost out of our ken, almost alien? I believe that any parent, anywhere, would recognise that feeling – and no, it never goes away.

active

The Ultimate Invasion false

2009-05-16T16:18:37-04:00

734