Dalai Mama Dishes

by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

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The Baby

Posted January 10, 2008
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Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.

"Ben -- which picture do you like better?"

Ben has gotten a little Spirograph-style mandala-drawing kit as a gift, and now Birdy is using it to pencil out a wobbly arrangement of shapes and squiggles, some drawn happily free-form, some traced agonizingly through the stencils. Ben himself is making a little collage of drawn candies -- a piece of gum, a Tootsie roll, a starlight mint, each one outlined and colored with markers, then cut out and taped onto an index card.

"You mean which of your pictures? Or which -- yours or mine?" he asks now, and Birdy says, "Which yours or mine."

"Well, Birdy," Ben says gently, "I don't want to hurt your feelings -- I mean, you're doing a really great job -- but if you really want to know, then mine."

"Well, Ben ... " Birdy seems to have adopted my conversational style: the hammer pounding away on a nail head that is flush with the wall and has nowhere else to go. "What if I were older than you, which would you like better?"

Ben's response is the sound of a gray marker coloring in his Hershey's Kiss.

"Ben -- which would you?"

Ben sighs. "Probably mine. Besides, just because you were older wouldn't mean you were a better drawer than me."

"But if I were a better drawer than you. If I were a way better drawer actually, which then?"

[Gray marker sound.]

"Ben. Which then?"

"Birdy. Birdy. I really don't want to talk about this anymore. This is the last time. I'm saying mine. Probably still mine because it would be mine and I drew it."

"But if I were the best drawer. I'm just saying if."

"Which then, Bennie? Which if I were the best? Then mine maybe, right? You don't have to say. But probably mine. Right?"

"Right, Bennie? Right?"

Poor Birdy. When they're grown-ups, the children's age difference will fade elliptically away. But for now, she's a plane taxiing down the runway, and instead of looking at the motionless landscape whizzing past, she's looking at another plane, and it's moving too, so she can't tell how fast she's going.

Us either.

Ben is our firstborn, the one bushwhacking trails through the wilderness of personhood. His achievements are new to us; we are constantly amazed by his reading and skating, his drawing and subtracting and the teeth tumbling from his gums in an avalanche of maturity. And then there's the second child, the one who can walk too, who is being taught by the preschool teachers who were already Ben's, who is trailing along -- not placidly, certainly not, not quietly, but minus some of the trumpeting fanfare. When I think of her, I think: silly and sweet. I do not know a person with a warmer heart than Birdy's, a more ingrained sense of kindness and inclusion. When she gets out the big bag of dolls and animals, for example, her love for them is entirely democratic: the Brazilian doll given to us by our friend Mothusi -- the one sewn from a feed sack and stuffed with sawdust -- gets the same number of kisses as the luscious pink velour doll with the vanilla-smell face. The plushly gorgeous golden retriever pup gets put to bed with Smokey, my childhood bear who was already threadbare when I got him at a flea market 30 years ago, and they are sung the same trembling lullaby version of "Eeeny Meeny Miney Mo."

And so it is that we find ourselves constantly surprised by how smart she is. She's sitting on the floor doing who knows what, emitting her constant bizarre monologue: "That would be funny if bones got chapped! Ha ha ha. That is so funny to think of. Like peely old lips -- just your bones. Ha ha ha. But they can't, I guess, since bones just get cuddled by your skin ... " And then you look over and what she's doing is actually completing a huge jigsaw puzzle, fitting each small piece patiently and unerringly into its proper place. Or what she's saying, when you stop again to listen, is "A half of a half is a quarter. Which means three other quarters that you still have. If you took one away."

"The baby is so smart," I say to Michael, and he says, "I know!" But he's surprised too. Does everyone have this with their youngest? In a dozen years, will I be saying, "The baby can do calculus!"? Will her accomplishments always bloom in our peripheral vision until we remember to turn our dazzled faces?

Even as I'm writing this now, she's lying next to me in the bed, newly awake just as I'm about to finish writing. "Mama?" she says. "Mama -- if you lean down here -- here, lean down with me -- you can see that little heart. In the tree." I lean down level with her enormous brown eyes and smell her morning pajama smell, then I turn to look at where her still-chubby finger is pointing and there it is: a clear space in the tree branches, lit up by the sun behind it. An open heart.

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The Baby

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About Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman is the author of the memoir, Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family, available online and in bookstores nationwide.

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