Baba! Baba!
She often calls herself “baba!” She says it two or three times while pointing at her chest and nodding her head. We often follow suit, calling her that as well. With the bigger two we tended to use fewer of their words, usually respondimg to their tiny-talk with grown up words. I don’t know why.
Baba’s not so much a baba anymore. What baba can identify itself as such? She’s 19 months old, more toddler now really. Mostly. Sometimes she become more baba. Like when she’s tired. Sometimes she gets older, like when she sits next to her sisters and leafs through a book,“mmm hmmm, mmm hmmm” as she nods and points at the words.
I think age is like an average over the course of the day. I am generally 40. I wake up feeling 50, caffeinated my way to 30 for a little while, then descend back to 40, and it averages out.
Baba’s gone younger, asleep in the carrier, her head nestled against my chest. My wife’s reading stories in the next room to the big girls who, tired from a day with three outings, are going younger themselves. I can’t tell what they’re whining about. I can just hear the tone of voice. It’s like clouds and humidity, you know it might storm but you’re not sure. You go about your day under that threat because if you stay in whenever the weather looks like that you’d become a shut-in.
These are regular occurrences - Baba wrapped closed to me asleep, the big kids trying not to yell about something, while I listen to a playlist of 90s music. It drowns out the big girls at all but their most enraged, and the drums help to make Baba fall sleep and to keep her there.
These songs bore me now. If she is 19 months old that is nearly six hundred days since her birth. I have done this at least 4 times a week in that span. I have played these songs into dust, muzak, scenery. They are a distracting scenery, though, not just boring.
Lyrics crowd in when I try to think, to read, type. I was trying to read an essay set in a nursing home and the verse about checking into a hotel for the sake of committing suicide comes on, and I get younger, broke twenty something talking over drinks about how the singer’s first band was better. I had an idea, then that chorus about dead grandfathers and past wars comes on, I get younger still, a frightened child unable to comprehend his shouting about his own father the ex-marine in comparison to whom he is a cakewalk. Forty again I try to pay attention to how deeply Baba is sleeping - is the angle of her head okay? do I need to bounce more vigorously on the exercise ball I’m sitting on? less? Do I need to walk? Sway? Stand still? Sing? Pat her back? And if I do will it help?
The constant interrupting and monitoring Baba lends itself to a headspace that can’t do much sustained thinking but can assemble a montage of bad memories, frustrations, regrets and worries. Will we be able to pay for the kids’ college? Oh the song with the Misfits reference. I haven’t called my parents in months, I am a bad son. Baba’s squirming, “shhhhh, shhhhh,” I pat her back.
In these evenings when my kitchen becomes a waiting room I am an impatient boy, hating how my time is water down the drain. I want the big girls’ stories to end sooner, even if they’re laughing hard. It’s strange how attention and boredom work; an excess of attention without an object is unpleasant, like a muscle that needs to move. Maybe I’ll read the wikipedia entry on boredom. My body complains that I need to stand, move a little. I do so, slowly, making shushing sounds to Baba as she shifts in her sleep. What was I going to read about? Was I going to read? Do I like reading?
Inevitably things turn aspirational. I read something about writing or music. I become intimidated, find a new reason to struggle to focus. Baba cries out. I restart the playlist, agree with the first song that yes, the world is such a drag and for a moment I appreciate the music again, as it is better to have the feeling in the virtual company of other than alone. I hum to Baba, in the ballpark of the song’s key and tune, I think. She settles again. Unable to focus I return to rapid fluctuations in my age and the collage of negativity. I add snapshots of the bands that didn’t go anywhere, the bands that started to before I quit in a huff. I lacquer over the top another layer of I could never and I will never and if only. It brings out new tones in the memories - job hunting all those years; drunken missteps and rudeness; a creative writing teacher who said my work always went in circles with no one growing or changing or having an epiphany, my saying “I guess that’s how my life feels?” and him scowling.
Now is the time of night when I skim headlines. Children in cages. Melting arctic ice. Impending war, again. The dissolution of a comic book company that I can’t tell if I am embarrassed that I still I care about or if I regret that I no longer care about. Some leak from the White House. None of it is good news, obviously. The closest it ever comes to good are moments of enjoying the emotional toestubbing of the world’s worst people.
The literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin once lamented that experience had been downgraded to information. I live that as I skim. Any information will do, really, kindling to help burn off some of the excess attention that weighs on me. It passes the time, or maybe it hides the passing of time.
Aspirational again I make myself type. My wife puts the middle child to bed, returns to take Baba to put her to bed (Baba often wakes up in the transition then nurses back to sleep). I make myself type further, look for connections, bits to expand, bits to cut. I shout down my judgment.
My oldest comes in telling me about what she’s been reading. Lately it’s ancient Egypt. I hug her, tell her to brush her teeth while she tells me, listen while she finishes her account of pyramid architecture. I love the excitement in her voice. I pick her up, she puts her head on my shoulder and sighs sleepily. I carry her to bed, “you’re my Baba too, you always will be.” The memories improve, my aging slows. I am thirty again, when she was born, 35 when her first sister arrived, 27 when her mother and I got married, 19 when we first met. I am back to living these relationship now (now-ish; sill trying to delay the impending future - let Baba slow down, let the Earth not heat so quickly, let the big kids not get bigger quite so fast), once more 40 and relatively content in arriving at average.