Where Adoration Begins: The Magic of Babies

Where Adoration Begins: The Magic of Babies
By Valarie Nordstrom
Issue 107, July/August 2001

Not long ago, my husband and I went out to dinner with friends. One couple had a new grandson, and after dinner they passed around a photograph. When I looked at that little boy's face, my breath jumped, and I felt something grab in my chest. "Oh, I can almost smell him," I said, and pointed to the baby's scrumptious cheeks.

The man seated next to me asked to take a look at the picture. "David," I prodded, "can't you almost taste those cheeks? He is very yummy." A smile came over David's face, and he agreed: yes, he could. As he passed the picture along to his wife, his eyes caught the eyes of his ten-year-old daughter across the table, and he grinned. I am pretty sure he was remembering the weight of her diapered bottom in his palm and a round warm cheek against his lips.

I admit that I'm goofy about babies and have been for a long time. They're delicious--that's how they hook me in, and then they grow up, and by then of course I am crazy about them. There was so much I didn't know. All these years later I'm still learning. I'm catching on. The babies were only the beginning.

My mother is a woman who is both intense and gentle, kind and funny, determined and sweet. We drive each other crazy once in a while, but I admire and love her so much. Her stories about me as a baby are full of the awe you hear in the voice of a young mother in love with her baby.

One of the earliest stories of my infancy is a tale of woe. We were living in a rented apartment with rented furniture; the ceilings were nine feet high, and the bed's oak headboard was massive. The story my mother tells is that she was crying one day because I was crying and she had no idea what to do for either of us, and so this is what my father found upon returning from work: two girls, in their underwear, crying in the big bed. "You were so beautiful, so incredible, and I felt so sad when I couldn't fix things," my mother recalls.

That was a generation ago, but nothing has really changed since then. Mothers still cry when their babies are inconsolable and they don't know what to do. In fact, we cry when our grown children cry! However, it's my mother's descriptions of me as an infant that tell me where my adoration of babies begins. I hear about the texture of my barely-there hair, and how rosy and luscious my cheeks were, how intelligent my eyes were, how sweet my smile.

When I was a new mother, I watched my mother pull my son into her arms and talk to him most intently when he was hardly more than a morsel. His upper lip rose to a point as he peered at her, and then in a second his whole face burst into a smile--his first smile. I couldn't believe my eyes! She turned and pulled me against her neck and said, "Oh my God, he's wonderful." Who can resist a baby?

In the years since that first baby, I've had seven more. The first was the one that baffled and worried me, then delighted me the most with his sense of humor. I had no idea babies love a joke! As he has grown, we have argued and scrapped like siblings. He and I and his dad and his brother have grown up together. I don't know why those two spirits were brave enough to come to a couple of goofs like we were, but I'm glad they did.

The first one had a glorious crown of satiny, springy gold curls. His brother followed on his heels a year later, and that second one--oh my goodness. He was little and lovely and thoughtful with skinny arms and creamy skin, but best of all, he was coated with fur. I didn't know there was a name for it: lanugo. It curled along his cheeks and shoulders and down his back. It was delicious and wonderful. I nibbled it after his baths, and when I rocked him to sleep, I'd slip a hand under his undershirt and stroke his fur. It was 14 years and four babies later before another furry one turned up. She's six now, and when I catch her and kiss the back of the neck, she giggles to me, "You like my fur, Mom." Sometimes new mothers seek me out, looking for some kind of insight into how to get babies to sleep all night or to eat their spinach. I have no idea, I say: throw the dang spinach away and take them to bed with you. Often, as I tell these mothers to let go and embrace their child's infancy as the love affair that it is, they smile, and their shoulders relax. I have given them permission to be fools in love and to not follow rules invented by someone who never was a mommy, who never birthed, who never nursed, whose shirt probably never even had snot on it.

When my oldest son was an infant, nothing concerned me more than getting him on a schedule. I would spend a good hour before I fed him, jiggling him and holding off until the clock said it was time, diligently following some lame schedule prescribed by the pleasant nurses who had instructed me. My mother set me straight on that the very first time I complained about it. She told me, "Honey, I don't go four hours without eating. Why should John? I think he's hungry, and you should feed him when he says so."