Child Agrees To Be Mommy’s Kid Forever

Kina has been seeming extra big lately, and Laurea and I have been trying to imagine ways in which we could keep her small forever—a “smallening potion”, constant squeezing, the reversal of time—all of which are, just to get it out there, not particularly fair to Kina as a distinct and sovereign human being, but it’s what we want, and you subscribed to this newsletter, so I don’t know what else you expected.

I ascribe Kina’s sudden hugeness to our having met—for the very first time—my friend Jason’s new daughter, who was born at the dawn of the pandemic and yet somehow can already walk and appreciate balloons. This little girl has it all: the chubby cheeks, the sassy waddle, the uncritical view of her own parents. She was so cute, I wanted to eat her right up1, or at least draw her a newspaper. Kina was very kind and gentle with this child, which reminded me of all the sweet four year olds who once doted on my tiny fifteen month old, sassy waddle and all.

Anyhow, when you see just how small a cool baby can be, it turns out you want to make your slightly older baby as small as that baby. The conventional wisdom says that you want to turn back the clock and recover that time and youth—their newly born youth, your less exhausted youth, whatever. Part of me thinks it’s actually that the kid is just more compact and easier to snuggle (or eat). In fact, though, I think there’s something beautiful about being needed; it feels good to know that somebody depends on you so totally, and that you’ve evolved to understand (mostly) how to meet their needs. In the moment, with your first kid, that’s wildly difficult; in hindsight, it’s easy peasy. “Imagine,” I told Laurea the other night after Kina had gone to bed, “if we could raise Kina as a baby again. We would have all the answers! It would be simple!”

This is exactly why people have second children, but I know that it is a trap. I love the second children of my friends, and I love my younger siblings, but I am by no means having a second kid. Laurea and I just want Kina to be our one kid forever, to the end of the world and then some—and, like Kina, we hope that’s a very, very long time from now. I don’t know if we even know what we mean by “being Mommy’s kid”. Is it that we want her to stay small and squishable? To need us willingly and completely? To be so full of malapropisms that I can fill over a year’s worth of newspapers with them? To stop time, maybe, just as this whole process gets a lot more fun. We are, at the moment, having so much fun together, and we want to continue to have fun for the rest of eternity with Kina, and to be close enough to the experience of her as a baby that we don’t forget any of it—the good or the bad.

I can’t eat Kina right up, because I wouldn’t be able to have her around anymore. I’d turn time around, but that would only give me four years. I’d squish her forever in my arms, not just to keep her small, but because that would mean I would have a license to never stop hugging her, knowing that if I did let go, she might not let me steal back in for another hug to outlast the end of the world.

Or I could just work on the smallening potion.

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