peevish mama

It is with a bit of trepidation that I sit down to write this post. I’m a superstitious gal (it’s the Latina in me), and I feel like the second I type these words, I’m going to regret it with a vengeance as deep and sweeping as a curse tumbling from the wrinkled lips of a bruja. But fair is fair and I once wrote that I would rechristen Devil Baby should there ever be sufficient change in, um, personality to warrant it. So here it goes. 

Devil Baby has turned a corner. She is no longer the pushy, demanding, chronic malcontent she has been since birth. She is slowly emerging from her role as the squeaky wheel who hogs all the grease and taking her position as the funny baby who’s all about keeping up, hanging out, fitting in and making us laugh. She is finally acting like those affable third born clowns I have heard so much about. And she washes windows!

Not coincidentally her language is exploding and she’s all about sprinkling her sentences with very grown up sounding “wells” and “actuallys.” She is dredging up old stories and recounting them as if she’s been holding them in her little brain for all these months just waiting to find the words with which to let them out. The other day she asked me if I remembered the bird in our house who missed his mommy and we tried to catch him with the yellow glove and he was so scared when we were screaming. I stopped chopping, turned around and there she was – a pint sized apparition in my kitchen telling me about something I had completely forgotten about with her little hand splayed out in a gesture. When we moved into this house there was a bird in the basement which, of course, caused a total commotion and yes, I did try to grab him with a rubber glove on my hand, but the first hint of disgusting birdish wing fluttering made me wretch and I ran away shrieking.

When I told Doctor Dash about it he marveled: she’s been waiting all this time to talk about it!

Aack! Brain flood! Not to put too fine a point on it, but again with the power of words! What a relief it must be to be heard and more importantly, to be understood. What a relief to be able to communicate more than the bare necessities. What a relief to be able to tell us something and have us react in a true and genuine way to her content, to her actual message. What a relief to be done with the baby bullshit where we try to appease her with a sing song repetition of what she just said or our pathetic attempts to hone in on what she wants by trial and error - What was that? You want fruit? Shoes? You want fruit chews? Fruit loops? Hoops? Shoes? You want your shoes? Croup? Hoop? Hula Hoop? My God. Talk about torture.

Maybe she’s just one of those people who needs to communicate, to tell her stories, to spread her happiness and her angst like seeds in a field. Maybe she’s constitutionally unable to hold anything in, to hold anything back. Maybe she needs to out put. And maybe she’s one of those people who doesn’t have a high tolerance for frustration or loneliness. Maybe now that she can be heard and understood, she’s feeling a little better about life. Ohhhhhkaaaay. This is sounding a bit close to home. I’m typing really slow, sort of wondering, why the hell it took me so long to have this revelation. What a fool I have been. Poor Devil Baby. All this time. All this time she was standing on the sidewalk, her nose pressed to the glass, staring at all those beautiful, colorful, delicious words. Hungry for expression. Hungry for connection.

So, Devil Baby is hereby renamed Angel Baby for purposes of this blog. I realize it is a bit of stretch, even for the new and improved Devil Baby, but there’s a nice symmetry to it.  Also, it will be easy to go back should this turn out to be nothing more than a fluke, a brief and fortuitous bout of tranquility. Angel Baby is never going to be totally easy going. She’s always going to be headstrong and demanding – she’s a girl who knows her mind – but at least now she can be happy. 

And now that Angel Baby can be happy, we can be happy.