A parent´s heart

I hear it all the time. If the vegetarian’s son ever touches meat, she will cry. If the humanist’s daughter ever treats a fellow human disrespectfully, her heart will break. If the animal activist’s children ever dissect a baby pig, if the scientist’s children ever forego immunizations, if the atheist’s children ever fall into religion, if the believer’s children ever break from the church… the parent will be distraught and inconsolable...

Which lends the question: is parental love and support conditional?

I think about it constantly. If, in raising Micaela, Pablo and I fail to instill within her the same values that we hold dear… will we be disappointed in ourselves or in her? Will our hearts break? Will we cry? And I think the answer is NO!

We definitely have our values. We value family and loyalty. We value hard work and perseverance. We value tolerance and faith. But if our baby girl values none of these, if she eschews family and cheats on her significant other, if she lazes about and quits on everything she starts, if she is openly judgmental and cynical… I suppose that we would love her still, support her still, accept her still.

I suppose that what it boils down to is that Pablo and I both believe that most people are inherently good.

And we both believe that sometimes good people do distasteful things. And we both believe that our daughter will be a good person who will make mistakes, and that we gave her life so that she could LIVE, so that she could experience all of who she is – positive and negative. And, naturally, we both believe that we will always love and support our little princess NO MATTER WHAT.

After all, we are her parents; we cannot see any other way...

Letter to my Sneak-a-boo: 19 months

Dear Micaela,

I have never, not ever, been as proud of anyone as I have been of you this past month. The past few weeks have been a whirlwind of activity and you, wonderful you, have taken it all in stride. And I should warn you now: this is going to be a long-ass letter. I can’t help myself. Sometimes, your father and I look at each other and are so overwhelmed by all that you are that the only thing we can think to say is "WOW!". Just wow.

The first big news is that you are waist-deep in what can only be termed a linguistic explosion. Every week, you learn a few new words and – AND THIS IS THE INCREDIBLE PART – you are enunciating well enough that strangers can understand and communicate with you. When you say UGO!, people hear JUGO.  When you say APATO!, people hear ZAPATO!  When you say BUBUJA!, people hear BURBUJAS!

This, to me, is far more magical than watching you learn to walk or climb or pick your grandparents out of a crowd. It’s like we handed you the keys to a door and when we turned around you’d unlocked the damned thing.

Which, by the way, is also beginning to happen. You have learned how to open the front door and the car and you refuse to let us leave the house without letting you open or close these. The only hitch is that you also think that you can open ANY door. When you see a locked cabinet at someone´s house or a locked door at your nursery, you immediately try to reach it and start to work. :)

You have fallen in love with music this month as well. You loved music before, don’t get me wrong, but over the past several weeks I’ve seen you do all the choreographies perfectly. And, oh Micaela, I always thought children’s music was lullabies and lameness, but the truth is that I enjoy an indie ditty about monkeys as much as you do. And no matter how great our music is, the fact is that you find songs about naptime or making pie together or flying in an airplane completely irresistible. You relate to them more, I suppose, and as a result you dance to them more and hum to them more. Which means I dance to them more and hum to them more too. Listening to music with you, turning on a tune about tea parties and having a little boogie-fest in your room, is quickly becoming one of my very favorite parts of every day.

The last big news is that you are making tons of new connections and growing into a very independent little girl. You almost feed yourself at nearly every meal and although you still make a beautiful mess, it is nothing compared with some of the masterpieces of months past. Although I nearly always let you play in any mess you create, you usually can’t wait to help clean it up. (I hope that penchant for scrubbing floors and tidying the playroom is around when you’re thirteen.) You can put on your shoes and throw a ball (you can also kick, and boy do you kick!) and you like to pretend to drink tea or banana-feed your fury pets. You like to spoon-feed your Daddy and me. You hug and kiss abundantly, especially when others are involved. You wave hello and say HOLA! to people and then you wave good-bye to them as well. You arrange things in categories – all the plastic stuff in one pile, all the fury pets in the next. You can identify pictures in books and make connections between images and reality. You understand almost everything we say to you, honestly.

You recognize when something is wrong and it either thrills (i.e. Momma put your pants on your head) or distresses (i.e. Mara is barking) you. You identify litter at the park and you know what to do with it, so you stand there, trash in hand, looking around until you find a trash bin to chuck it into. You can walk up stairs without a railing. You can stack eight or nine blocks at a time and you can both sign and verbalize your need to poop. You can push a stool to the sink, climb up, wash your hands with soap, climb down, push the stool to the towel, climb up, and dry your hands. You can identify alm/ost all of your body parts, from your eyebrows to your belly button, from your fingers to your toenails, from your elbow to your thigh. And you can identify characteristics of my body as well – you can point to my moles and my freckles and my earlobes.

You follow directions well too, even if they’re complicated. If I ask you to please find your bear toy and tuck it into the laundry bag by our closet and then come back to the bedroom, you will-not-rest  until you have located the toy, shoved it in the bag, and come back to your bedroom. Then you tug at my pants pockets or my hand and lead me over to show me that you did it, you found that toy and put it in the bag, LOOK AT YOU! Look at you, indeed.

We love you more than monkeys love bananas (and everybody knows that’s an awful lot),
Momma and Daddy

Well-loved

We have been stopped every day for the past eighteen months.

Mothers at the park point and wave. Look at the cute baby, they say to their brood, I remember when you were that small. Old men shopping at Wong tickle her chin. Mine are all grown, they chuckle, and it happened too fast. Isn’t it the best time you’ve ever had?, they ask before taking off again. Neighbors stop us when we run into them on our way to the grocery. She is just so adorable, they tell me, you’re a lucky woman.

It warms a mother’s heart, it does.

Parenthood has made me slow down in so many ways. When Micaela was days old, I commented to Pablo that babies were made for slower times. And they are. Feeding them is time-consuming, diaper changes are frequent, and naps are unpredictable. Games are played hundreds of times over, and then again because the kid smiled. Small children thrive on a slow, dull routine.

But the way it has slowed me down the most is this: I always stop. I admire, I enjoy, and I listen to tales of children grown and growing.

I would love to say that it’s because I am a kind-hearted and patient person, but that isn’t true. No. It’s because four or five times a week, someone pops out the one compliment that I cannot resist. They tell me that it is clear to them that my daughter is loved.

Oh, I say every time, relishing the moment, smiling at my little princess, holding her close. Oh, she is.