Benjamin Penguin

Dear Benjamin,

This past month has been an important one because our lives are about to take a new direction. In the back of her mind, Mama has always had three things that she wanted to achieve in her adult life. I say adult life because when I was a wee one, like you will be in a few years, my main goals in life were to eat pizza daily, play Space Invaders at the arcade and become a cowgirl. The pizza goal has remained, but sadly, the others have fallen to the wayside. As an adult, the three desires that I wished to have fulfilled were to find someone to share my life with, to have a child and to earn a doctorate degree. I met Daddy at the end of 1999 and during our very first date, I had a pretty strong suspicion that I had just met someone very remarkable. We talked for almost eight hours and watched the sun rise from a greasy Denny’s window. It was probably one of the most romantic moments of my life. You entered my life eight months ago and it has never been the same since. So I now have two men in my life that enrich my world every day. Which leaves this little pesky desire for a doctorate degree. I’m not entirely sure why I want it. Maybe because so few people go so far in school to actually get one. Maybe because it is the ONLY way I can be called a doctor and not have to peruse wounds and guts and all things bodily. Or maybe it’s because, like most things in my life, I cocked my head to the side one day and declared, “I think I’ll get a PhD.” Oh, that I were kidding.

The thing is, pal, that when I had all these little daydreams about having a family and getting my degree, it was this seamless, beautifully encapsulated experience that had me rising at dawn, moving enthusiastically and energetically through my day with a journal article read here and a kiss on a baby’s forehead there and then retiring at night following a robust and satisfying conversation with Daddy as we sunk into our bed. Oh, and you were sleeping. And I was not 50 pounds overweight. And I’m pretty sure I didn’t have cats randomly scratching me in my sleep. I just assumed that I could have my work and my family and I – not every woman, but I – would easily balance the two in such a way that neither would suffer. Only, I don’t think it is going to work that way and what is happening is that when I pit you against my books, you are winning by a landslide. I don’t think this is a bad thing. Rather, it is yet another piece of evidence in the rapidly expanding file that all point to the conclusion that you have changed me in very dramatic ways. Pre-Benjamin, I used to let myself get lost in my books and my articles and my assignments and my various research assistant positions. When I was still pregnant with you, I would often internally remark that I would allow me to lose myself in you for the first six months and then I’d just jump right back into my work and my studies. The problem with this assumption, a problem I could not have predicted at the time, is that the time I spend with you begets the desire to spend even more time with you. Six months came and went and I was not less likely to want to spend time with you. If anything, I could not imagine how I would move through a day that didn’t revolve around being able to tickle your fat feet, pinch your fat cheek or grab your fat little baby thigh at will. You are irresistibly delicious company.

At the same time, I find myself energized in very important ways by my academic studies and my professional work. I really enjoy talking with my classmates and colleagues and it has been fun to use my brain again for things other than a careful investigation into the possible reasons why you are undeniably exhausted and yet refuse to bother with the trite activity of napping. Since you are so young and have a rudimentary understanding of human language at best, I can’t quite explain to you that Mama needs a few hours to read her texts and think through IMPORTANT SOCIAL ISSUES so please just take these plastic keys and your stuffed duck and amuse yourself for a while, thanks. Your demands are immediate and very basic in their nature – you feel hunger, thirst, tiredness, boredom and the discomfort of a dirty diaper. In the face of these very tangible needs, it is difficult to justify the time-consuming mental machinations that are involved in developing faux comprehensive social policies while respecting fiscal constraints and public opinion for a course assignment. I mean, you need to eat. These theoretical people in Assignmentland need to eat as well (or get health care or whatnot) but they don’t exist beyond my professors’ cerebral cortex. Your needs are more pressing. My need to complete my work is also important, but these tasks don’t really compare and thus makes it very difficult to balance my days. So these past few weeks have really been marked by a sense of upheaval as we all attempt to find the new normal for our family. Most days Daddy and I walk around in a mildly zombie-like stupor while you smile away, oblivious to the fact that we would willingly sign up for an experimental clinical trial in Red Bull intravenous therapy if it meant that we could utter a sentence without slurring 40 percent of the words. The fact that you seem unruffled by these changes suggests that we have been fairly successful in shielding you from our more unpleasant exhaustion-induced snippiness and impatience. Daddy and I try to keep things in a calm perspective, but there have been days when you are unaware of how close you’ve come to watching Daddy fumble gracelessly as he tries to remove a carton of Similac from an unmentionable place.

In spite of the general tiredness and busyness that has come to rule over the apartment, I would be remiss if I did not mention all of the really cool ways in which you have continued to evolve into an ever more fascinating little Benjamin. I’ve had Daddy actively help me compile the list of new things you’ve been doing because there have actually been a large number of changes and I wanted to make sure I remembered them all. In fact, I made him write them all down on a yellow legal pad for me, which he willingly did because he loves nothing more than to think about and talk about all things Benjamin. So let’s start with the funnies. You are a lad of good spirits and there seems to be so many things that amuse you. You still enjoy putting things in people’s mouths and you enjoy watching all manner of apartment animals climbing on surfaces they should not be climbing on, knocking items to the floor, meowing or barking for attention and creating general havoc in our lives. For every act that leaves me in gape-jawed exasperation, you are smiling away at their silly antics and it reluctantly prevents me from tossing them in a pillowcase and chucking them out the window. When I was a less stressed, less harried, less tired Mama, I found all their little mannerisms adorable as well, but now they are added to the list of things that I now tolerate rather than savor. I used to love grocery shopping and thumbing through junk mail as well, but the thought of those two things can now render my flesh to break out into itchy hives. You seem to like animals in general, a realization that pleases Daddy and I to no end. You are always trying to pet or grab a cat or the dog and you enjoy watching videos of animals. Daddy likes to play videos for you while you are eating, so you are routinely amused by the comedic stylings of naughty kittens and mischievous puppies and izen baren (the polar bears featured in some obscure little German video that Daddy found on the internet).

And in what I am sure is a harbinger of things to come, you are singularly fascinated with Spongebob Squarepants. Regardless of what you are doing, when you hear the siren song “Who lives in a pineapple under the sea…” your head whips towards the direction of the television and you sit transfixed as Spongebob and Patrick engage in shenanigans on the screen. When Daddy and I watched the movie Supersize Me a few years back, the star of the movie mentioned that the young children interviewed for the movie could readily identify pictures of Ronald McDonald and could easily sing the jingles from fast food commercials. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but I’ve begun to consider that more now that it is clear you are building associations between things you have seen before that bring you pleasure and the visual or auditory clues that suggest the thing is presently available for your entertainment. I wonder what marketing ploys you’ll be susceptible to and just how soon I’ll have to start navigating the trying conversations between your commercially driven wants and our criminally barren bank account. Tonight, you did something pretty fascinating, though. As you were sitting in Daddy’s lap watching Spongebob, you let out a little laugh when Spongebob did something silly on the show. It seemed pretty clear that the laugh was in response to what you were watching because neither Daddy nor I nor the animals were doing anything that would have elicited a laugh from you. For a while now you’ve been laughing when Daddy or I do something silly in an attempt to make you laugh, but this was the first time you expressed amusement towards something 2-dimensional and so obviously not alive.

Your emotions have become much more rich and complex in the past few weeks. You have visibly discernible emotional states that emerge in response to certain stimuli. Daddy and I have both witnessed ample examples of happiness, and your smile shines brightly when Daddy or I enter the room after any length of absence from you. One of my favorite things about coming in to get you from your nap when you awake is the way your face lights up when you see me and the way your chubby cheeks crumple up under the weight of your huge grin. You also have a silly side and express this through the little jokes you pull to amuse yourself. Be it jamming an item in our mouths or eyeballs, headbutting our shoulders when we hold you, making a loud and random sound or doing something unexpected that has me make an apparently funny shocked face, you are diligent in your efforts to extract giggles deep from within your belly. But I think the most interesting emotion that you’ve been sharing with us as of late is anger. It is such a sophisticated little emotion to express because it suggests that you are conscious of some thing that you desire coupled with the realization that you cannot have this thing. I first noticed you getting angry when I placed a small washcloth on your highchair table and you became angry when I tried to remove it from your hands. You shrieked and scrunched up your face and started kicking your legs. At first I wasn’t sure if that was what I was truly observing, so I gave you back the washcloth and then rudely took it away again and you had the same response. Since then you’ve shown evidence of getting angry any time Daddy or I take something away from you or if we don’t let you have something you want or if we put you someplace you don’t want to be. In some ways this helps me to determine how to better figure out what I can do to make you happy, but after you’ve kicked me in the stomach for the fifth time I sometimes think that I might enjoy a little bit of the old innocence again.

Physically, you’ve finally gone and done that thing I have been writing about for months now. You can sit up on your own. I’m not sure why I was looking forward to that so much. I think because it is adorable to see little fat baby thighs supporting a little fat baby potbelly and watching little babies bob and weave as they attempt to stay upright. As with everything that you’ve done that has been physical in nature, you’d not do it, not do it, not do it and then wake up one day and suddenly be able to do it. I had been trying to get you to sit up for a few weeks by sitting behind you and then slowly removing my hands from around your middle. You’d stay like that for a few moments before flopping forward and then I’d tickle your sides and consider you the cutest baby I’d ever seen. One morning, however, when I pulled my hands away from your sides, you just sat there. You bobbled a little bit, but you sat there for a full five minutes. So there it was – you went from a full on flop to a full on sit in about 24 hours. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again that I think you can do things long before you actually do them but for whatever reason you want until you are good and ready to display your new skills like a pro. Mama likes to pull a similar sneak attack on people and so it isn’t exactly an unusual tendency in this house. Mama has been known to catch wind of a potential new friend’s interest in a certain thing and then spend time reading up on said thing so that she can miraculously have a common denominator to talk about during those first few weeks of a friendship. I think your tendency to wait to do something until you are good at is born from a similar desire to put on a good show for people the people you like. It’s fun to take people by surprise, buddy. We’ll be quite the team when you are older.

Love,
Mama