Little Labors

The beginning of misunderstanding

I sometimes feel, as a mother, that there is no creature I better understand than my child. This is probably because she can’t really say anything. I am beginning to worry, as she is just beginning to speak, that we are entering the beginning of misunderstanding. (Though I understand that it is likely that before it was only a misunderstanding that led me to think I understood.) Her words are: bubble, ten, shoes, mama, papa, eyes, up, and encore. A writer once said to me of his two children, “I found that once they started to speak, my friends lost all interest in them. Before they spoke, it seemed like they might be thinking anything. Then they learned language and it turned out they just had a list of wants and dissatisfactions.” It’s as if babies don’t grow larger but instead smaller, at least in our perception. It’s striking that in the canonical Gospels, we meet Jesus as a baby and as an adult, but as a child and teenager, he is unserviceable.