Ballad Of A Babyman

Two weeks ago I surrendered my Nikon D80 to the fine folks at BestBuy. The auto-focus wasn’t working.

Now, if you know anything about the D80, you know that this is a camera meant to be used on manual. Any photographer worth her salt could cope with using the manual focus. So why didn’t I just soldier on?

One—I’m not a very good photographer. I just happen to have a wonderful camera that makes my snapshots look better than they do when I use my iPhone.

Two—The Babyman.

Oh, The Babyman.

The Babyman begs to be photographed. His blue eyes and his ripe-peach cheeks are a siren song for the lens. He grows and changes so quickly that I often grab my camera to capture that one moment when he is 12 months and two days old, because he will never, ever look that way again—not the way he looks at that moment.

But The Babyman? He never stops moving.

For the past three days, he’s been in full nap-boycott mode, rising before dawn and refusing to close his eyes for more than 15 minutes during the day. I kid you not—yesterday the child woke at 6 a.m. and napped for exactly 21 minutes.

After that? He was awake until he went to bed at 7:15, despite three attempts to lay him in his crib for at least some quiet time.

But no. He wailed and flailed and cried for me so pathetically that after an hour of listening to him plead for his freedom, I caved and fetched him from his maple-and-blue-blanket prison.

He climbed the sofa. He tried to get inside the dryer. He opened every cupboard containing dangerous chemicals. He got into the sippy-cup drawer and industriously emptied it. Later, I found a princess cup tucked inside the food processor, it’s matching lid snuggled inside a sauce pan.

He bumped his head, bit his tongue, stubbed his toe. He ate two Goldfish crackers, a raspberry and a handful of peas for dinner, turning up his nose at any source of protein offered to him.

He tore off his bib, did an authentic Houdini impression during a diaper change, and threw an actual baseball with such force that I felt compelled to duck when the sphere hurtled toward my torso.

Finally, during his bath, he stood up and strode across the tub, slipping on the plastic and his wet sister, bashing his head into the faucet—which, thankfully, is encased in sleeve made to look like a grinning rubber duck.

He turned to me—Mama! Mama!—bleating like a lamb. He rubbed his enormous eyes and reached for me. “All done!” he said, opening and closing his hands in his toddler wave. “All done!”

All done, indeed.

Wrapped in a towel with a hood, he looked like a baby again. I kissed him vigorously on the mouth, getting a wiggle and a wail for my trouble.

Lotion, powder, diaper, pajamas. Hair brush, hugs and kisses. A bottle and a soft, brown monkey with a blanket for body.

Lights out.

The Babyman is on his way to becoming a boy, walking the plank every day as he gets bolder and bolder. As the captain of his ship, I hold my breath each time he gets to the edge, peering down into the deep blue sea. I want to reach out, grab the tail of his shirt, haul him back to safety.

My little pirate is so brave, so fearless. And I am a-swoon with admiration. He is everything I am not, but I can say with some authority that despite our differences, I made him.

But with every passing moment, and with every blurry photograph, he becomes ever more himself.

The Babyman.