Benjamin Penguin

Dear Benjamin,

What? You thought that the monthly letter would be the one area of my life in which I was NOT seriously lagging behind on the deadline? Oh, Benjamin. Let me tell you about the paper that was due 2 years ago. Or the website that was due 5 years ago. Or how about this little fact: I graduated with an undergraduate degree in an impressive 10 years. Look, Mama attempts to be punctual and sometimes, when the forces of the universe align in just the right way, it accidentally happens for her. But in reality, you should really prepare yourself for mad dashes to appointments/school/parties/visits/etc. and please, please know that any calendar I keep will be a blank calendar with no dates written on it. Mama tries. Mama often fails in this regard.

There are two notable things about this monthly letter that I should point out. One being the ridiculous tardiness of it. But the other, more interesting observation, is that this will be the last letter that I will be able to write alone. After nearly 10 months of you and I taking on the days as a two-person show, we’re now about a week away from changing cast members. Daddy is about to take on the bulk of your care as Mama returns to work full time. This means that Mama is going to rely on Daddy more for the day-to-day reports of the new things you are experiencing and the new adventures you are having and the new little tasks you have mastered. I feel remarkably OK about all of this, and let me tell you why.

Daddy and I have often asked each other who you will take after more as you grow up. As you’ll see in years to come, Daddy and I aren’t exactly similar in some regards. We share beliefs on some pivotal issues (animal rights, good; gingivitis, bad), but other than that, we are kinda different people. Daddy is a homebody. He likes his peace and quiet and he doesn’t really care for friends, going out or being social. He can spend 10 hours alone in an apartment and, as long as Mama pops her head in for a few minutes a day, he’s content to subsist on that level of human interaction. More time with me would be lovely, but those few moments leave him energized enough to get through a day. And then there is Mama. I think the best way to describe Mama would be as a sponge. Although a sponge is somewhat passive, so let’s call Mama a vacuum. Mama is a big, doughy vacuum that needs to suck in as much sparkle and lights and noise and conversation and human activity as humanly possible or she starts to lose her mind. I can’t take being alone. I can’t take not talking to someone all day. I can’t take staying in the apartment for more than a few hours before I go insanely stir crazy. I can’t take feeling cut off from the rest of society –when they are laughing, lunching, crying and moving, I want to be doing that, too. Of course, I absolutely want to be doing these things with you and Daddy at my side, but if you and Daddy can’t do it or you both need to nap, hey, that’s cool, lemme just do my thing and I’ll be tired in about 10 hours and I’ll come home and be exhausted enough to actually have the patience to sit on the floor and watch you roll in circles and then we’ll all change into our comfy clothes and we’ll all sleep together. Yay!

Do you see where this is leading, pal? What this means is that you’ll either be a little Daddy-person or you’ll be a little Mama-person. Crowds, noise and social activity will either drain you mercilessly or energize you completely. You’ll be content talking to just us or you’ll wonder what other people are thinking and feeling and you’ll engage them in just such a conversation. You’ll find pleasure in the quiet routine of the home or you’ll spend hours scrounging up ways to amuse yourself in public. We can’t really know until you get there, but this whole preceding conversation is predicated on one point: Mama is not going back to work because she doesn’t love you like crazy and because she doesn’t enjoy the time she spends with her little gentleman. Mama is going back to work because if she doesn’t, she is just going to lose it completely. If you grow up to be like Mama, you’ll get this and then I can let go of this niggling maternal guilt. If you grow up like Daddy, you’ll sigh in exhausted weariness and resign yourself to being dragged along on numerous outings and the sheer desperation with which I pursue my refusal to stay indoors will eventually lead you to the insight that I’m doing this not because I want to but because if I don’t, I’m a much less pleasant and reasonable person. Then I can let go of this niggling maternal guilt.

I am a good Mama. I believe this. But I think, in these earliest two years, when a quiet, predictable stability is most necessary for the healthy development of a wee one, Daddy seems to be the better primary caregiving candidate. He has the temperament to stay indoors for 16 hours while you proceed through your day. Wake, eat, bottle, nap, wake, play, eat, bottle, nap, wake, play, eat, bottle, play, hang out, bottle, bed. I managed to find large chunks of time for our outings because, in your miraculously infinite infant patience, you put up with me trucking you all over the place and napping in your stroller as I took long, rambling sojourns around parks, museums, zoos or walking trails. Or napping in your car seat as I took long, rambling drives to nowhere just to get out of the house. It never seemed fair that I sometimes put my need for human contact above your need for a solid nap in your crib, but I hope that you’ll understand if you ever read this as an adult. I have to note though that I, as opposed to Daddy, am going to be AWESOME during your most active childhood years because as you list of the fourteen things you want to do in the next hour, I am going to be right alongside you, nodding my head vigorously and shouting, “Me, too, buddy. Me, too!”

And with all that said, I think it is essential that you know that I would never have given up the 10 months we’ll have spent together when all is said and done. You are just so precious to me. There were days when I was counting down the minutes until Daddy came home, true. But then there were also glorious, wonderful, fabulous days when you and I would conspire to amuse ourselves and the sound of your giggling glee could be heard throughout the apartment. Those types of days far outnumbered any days where I was feeling so antsy I nearly left the apartment in a hurried rush still dressed in my pajamas. I was there to witness your first little smile, your first giggle, the first time you reached for a toy, the first time you sat up by yourself, and most recently, the first time you took my hands in yours and allowed me to help you lift up off the ground into a standing position. As you grew from a newborn into the magnificent little infant that you are now, I’ve marveled at the particular challenges involved in this kind of passage of time. One day you can’t do something and the next you can. Perhaps even more emotional is the realization that one day you are doing something and the next you are not. I can tell you with fair accuracy the first time you ate solid food. I have video of the first time you sat up on your then-new yellow and blue foam mat. I can tell you that on Saturday, October 25, you had your first nibbles of doughnut and you loved it. But I can’t tell you the exact day or hour that you breastfed for the last time. I didn’t record it because I didn’t know it was going to be the last time. So time, in all its incarnations, has been a curious thing this past 10 months. I’ve loved and hated how quickly and how slowly it has passed.

It’s Daddy’s turn now to get to see some pretty amazing firsts and to try this full time caregiver role on for size and I think this is a great thing. I’ve been able to enjoy you for many, many months now and Daddy’s so eager to be able to do the same. I have the good fortune of only having to work four days a week and getting to spend a full three days with you. I have the good fortune of having a wonderful boss that cherishes family and will allow me the time and space to be there for you whenever it is needed. I have the good fortune of having Daddy in my life to provide care for you. All of these factors make me feel OK about the upcoming changes. Nostalgia will have me missing the routine that we’ve forged together over the year, but I can’t help but also feel excitement about the new changes as well. It’s not often that daddies get to do what your Daddy is about to do and I’m delighted that he gets that chance. I’ve seen the way you hug him and chomp on his face and smile and laugh in his presence, and I have no doubt that you two are going to be just fine.

So let me tell you then, boy wonder, how I’ve watched you change in such amazing ways over the past 50-ish days. I have to start with the scooting. Because, well, it’s really cute. We live in a shoebox of a place. It will always hold a special place in my heart because it is our first residence together as a family, but it isn’t palatial. Last month, you were a baby content to amuse yourself on this adorable 4×6 foot foam mat that I bought you. I would spread your toys out and you would dutifully beat them together and throw them at various animals passing by. If they dared lay on your mat, you beat them with said toys. But the key word here is that all shenanigans took place on the mat. And then one day, you got up on your hands and knees. You promptly plopped back down again. But then, a few minutes later, you tried it again. And for the rest of the day, you’d try this little move out every time you were placed on the mat. This continued for about two weeks, until you had the realization that if you sort of threw yourself forward as you were plopping down from your hands and knees position, you’d be that much closer to something of interest. This was interesting to you for a few days, until you realized that if you just stopped with the hands and knees business and lay upon your stomach, using your knees to propel you forward in a commando army crawl, you could actually get to totally awesome and intriguing things across the mat. From then on, it was inevitable that the mat would be a mere resting stop on your travails across the living room. Which brings me back to the comment about the smallness of this apartment. Before I could even prepare to have you crawling all over the place, you were, in fact, crawling all over the place and finding yourself under the daybed, under the tables, under a dog’s leg, etc. I’ve since rectified the situation, removing the wobbly bookcases and the tempting DVDs and pretty much turned the living room into a baby playroom of sorts. You’ve thanked me by starting to dart off down the hallway. The lesson here is that a child is always two steps ahead of his parents. Oh, and that we should probably move the cat food bowl out of the hall. I’ve had fun watching you move about the floor, if for no other reason than when you are about to do something naughty, you turn to look back at me with a big grin and then as I get up to remove the glass of steaming hot coffee/plate/piece of metal cutlery/cat toy away from your grasp, you turn back and scuttle away from me like the tortoise trying to create distance from the hare.

One of the other really adorable things that you have now started to do is to mimic Mama and Daddy when we do certain things. I had a cold recently and sometimes when I would cough, you would mimic my cough. When I would look surprised, you would laugh. I have the tendency to wave to things as I am pointing them out to you, as if to say hello to all the diverse things in the world, and you’ve started to wave as well. And this one time, when Daddy and I took you to the zoo, we were tracing the movements of a seal on the glass in the underwater viewing room and you reached out a chubby little hand and did the same. You also laugh when Daddy and I laugh, even though you’ve no idea what we are laughing at and you’ve attempted to hold a crayon and color with it after watching Mama and Daddy color in a little coloring book we got at a local restaurant. For me, this has been one of my favorite changes because it’s been the first time I’ve really felt like I was interacting with you in a reciprocal way. There is so much to learn and so much to accomplish as you grow and while I enjoy the physical achievements that you make, I simply LOVE watching your mind at work. I can see you beginning to calculate your moves, beginning to anticipate that something is going to happen (like when I hold my hands a certain way, an action that generally precedes me tickling your feet) and beginning to find ways to express your pleasure and frustration. I can even see the primordial soup of what I think will be a charming sense of humor.

And I’m pretty sure you love animals. Daddy and I could not be happier about this. We’ve recently acquired a membership to a local zoo and you and I have been spending a lot of time there. The very first time we were there, one of our first stops was at the giraffe enclosure. As the giraffe came closer to us, you started smiling and grabbing my sleeve (Your new method for expressing both joy AND anger. Try to work through that conundrum.). You’ve also taken a shine to other animals, as well, and seem thoroughly content to wander around the zoo for hours. Daddy and I already could see that you loved to interact with all the animals here in the apartment, as you are constantly smiling at them or trying to pet and/or pummel them. But it was really neat to see you find pleasure in larger, enclosed animal varieties, too. Daddy has gone with us now on two occasions and I think he’s hooked as well. We always seem to have such a lovely time there, the three of us. It makes me daydream fondly about a time when you will be older and the zoo will be more meaningfully fun for you.

As I mentioned earlier, you’ve stopped breastfeeding altogether now. I really can’t recall the last time that we nursed together, only that I remember not consciously thinking that it was going to be the last time. So I didn’t pay attention to it in the way you fail to pay attention to things you assume will be a part of your life for quite some time. It was a gradual shift from you mostly nursing full time at 6 months, to nursing 50 percent of the time at 7 months, then about 25 percent of the time at 8 months. At some point in the past 5-6 weeks, you just stopped. I didn’t encourage it and I didn’t work to prevent it. You didn’t push for it and you didn’t fight it. As with everything you do, the time must have just felt right for you. When I think about nursing now, I’m much less likely to break into a sweat and bust out a panic attack. Again, time has a way of allowing us to put aside the more stressful aspects of an experience and allow the warm glow of nostalgia to arise and take the place of certain memories. Now when I think of our nursing sessions, I just see your little face at my breast and can recall your warm body in my arms and the way that we would doze off together. I can still sometimes remember the soft tickle of your hair against my forearm and the feel of your breath on my chest. I’m glad to have moved on from nursing, but I love it now in a way that I never could when I was in the throes of nursing you.

That is parenting, though, isn’t it? You balance your visions of the perfect parenting moments with the need to get through your hour, your day or your week because it demands so much of you that you can barely see straight half the time. It’s like taking a vacation that can’t possibly live up to the daydream you’ve created as you feel the seconds ticking away in your cubicle. When you get there, you burn the soles of your feet as you stumble around on the bright, glistening beach. You know you want to move forward, towards the water, to collect the little shells at the shore, but the sun is blinding and the wind is whipping your hair into your eyes. And then a giant wave crashes over you and you get tossed about the surf for a while. But the water recedes and you are left there on the sand, drenched but smiling. Months later, when you are getting your bag down from the closet to retrieve something behind it, little grains of sand spill to the ground and you think to yourself, “Oh that day? That day was the most wonderful day ever.”

Thanks, buddy, for being my sunny day at the beach.

Love,

Mama