Aman

When I first found out I was having a baby I didn’t feel very much besides nausea. I had never been overly maternal or felt any ticking from the old body clock. Over the months of gestation, the nausea receded but though various worries kept manifesting themselves, I didn’t feel any special bond with the baby. I worried about that too.

After my son was born, since I was woozy and passed out from the sedation, everyone else in the immediate family saw him before I did. And even when I saw him I didn’t feel what I expected – a gush of love so strong and powerful that nothing else would compare. My husband seemed to have bonded much faster than I did. Through the first couple of months of endless feeding and cleaning I guess my son and I took our first tentative steps (obviously metaphoric in his case) towards understanding each other and maybe liking.

My son is six months old now. And today as I watch him, I am touched by myriad emotions. At times his air of fragility and vulnerability annoy me, make me angry. Nobody should be so weak, so defenceless. How will I protect him, not just from the rest of the world but even from me and my moods?

I watch him reach for a toy and fail to grab it – it is beyond his reach. He struggles, screwing up his forehead in concentration, wriggling his little body this way and that. His tiny rump sticks up in the air – he has just taught himself to start crawling backwards. Sometimes his forehead bangs down on the mat in weariness or frustration. Finally he figures out a short cut – he pulls at the mat till it folds up, bringing the toy within his grasp. I am amazed at his ingenuity.

As I massage his body, I feel the softness of his skin - softer than cream or butter or down, smoother than silk or satin. I can’t help myself - I kiss his tiny dimples at the elbow, the almost invisible one on his left cheek. I kiss the deep lines in his thighs and the little indentations in his feet. His curling eyelashes almost touching his eyebrows. His chubby fists. His rosebud mouth, down the pale nipples to plant a raspberry into his belly. His rounded rump. His wispy hair, flying in the breeze. I try and imprint a visceral memory of his body as it is right now since none of his photographs or videos seem to capture him the way my eyes see him. And my eyes will not be able to recall this moment of his life like my body can.

His smiles light up not just his face but my day. He laughs with his whole body and I can feel the knots in mine loosen up. I love the confidence he has that if he cries in a particular way or makes a certain noise, someone will not only hear but interpret the sounds and be there instantly to supply his needs and wants. I wish he could always have that certainty. I marvel that his perfect body came from my imperfect one, that half of his intelligence and his genes came from me.

He is like the long vertical stroke of the letter ‘I’, which joins up the two short parallel lines. Before he came along, my husband and I were the two parallel lines going in the same direction but still independent. Now he has taken a part of me, a part of my husband and his own particular magic. And joined the three of us into an interdependent unit. He has made us a family.