Little Labors

People who get along well with babies

Four women are having dinner together. One begins to tell of how well her mother gets along with her baby, her grandson. The woman’s mother, the grandmother, prepares Hungarian food for the baby, she prepares him chicken with walnuts and pomegranate in rice which is then stuffed into a pepper — he loves it. The mother’s mother also has things to say to the baby all day long, she is in a constant conversation with him, she doesn’t run out of spirit to talk to him, and he loves it, and, because she talks to him so much, and cares for him so much, she is also the best at getting him to laugh; he loves her; she loves him. “I even believe,” the friend says, “that when me and my sister were babies, she was also this good.” Another mother at the table (who is, naturally, also a daughter) has her mother living with her right now, for a few months, as she helps take care of her granddaughter, now a young girl, no longer a baby. The grandmother is good with the young girl, very good, but maybe she was even better with her when she was a baby. When she was a baby, she was amazing with her, and she was a difficult baby, a colicky baby. This grandmother is wonderful with babies, and with the very elderly, she is wonderful with the extremely vulnerable, it is observed, she cheerfully anticipates their needs, even as, with the not very vulnerable, she can be, actually, quite difficult. I then shared a story, about my own grandmother, a woman who is not noted for her sunny disposition, not at all, but who also, like these other noted women, is really wonderful with babies; she raised her grandchildren, and even helped raise her great-grandchildren, when they were tiny. Even now, her great-grandson, a toddler — his favorite activity is to bring his great-grandmother her cane. My mother also takes babies very seriously, loves them, and when I return home after having left the baby with her, I never find them separated, either the baby is asleep on my mother’s chest, or she is sitting right next to her on the sofa, gesturing. And so on.

Then I notice that somehow we speak suspiciously of people whom we describe as getting along unusually well with babies. As if they do not get along with adults. And I realize that I have become someone who gets along unusually well with babies too. And that I miss my baby, and am desperate to leave to return home to her.