The game was called “I Forgot I Had a Baby.” We invented it together, my older son and I, one afternoon when he was about eight months old. He was sitting in my lap, facing me. I let my eyes wander around the room, pretending to daydream — and then suddenly caught sight of him and said, with a gasp of happy astonishment, “Oh — I forgot I had a baby!” After a startled instant, he cracked up. It was one of those uncanny, thrilling moments of shared experience. Your child is new and relatively helpless; he has yet to acquire words; but no words are necessary. You both get the joke.
“I Forgot I Had a Baby” became a staple in our house. The wandering gaze, the hammy obliviousness, the dramatic moment when I discovered him sitting in my lap: repetition was part of the game. But it changed, too. Soon I could ask, “Do you want to play ‘I Forgot I Had a Baby’?” and he could answer— first simply by understanding the question and laughing, and then with words. Eventually we developed a variation, “I Forgot I Had a Mother,” where he got to call the shots: how long to let his gaze wander away from mine, how to dramatize the shock of finding that he did, indeed, have a mother, who was holding him in her lap.
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Last week, my soon-to-be 32-year-old son graduated from law school. He was always the one to make me laugh--and he still does. All I could think of was the old song by Malvina Reynolds, the one they used in the long-gone Kodak commercial: "Where are you going, my little one, little one, where are you going, my baby, my own? Turn around, and you're tiny, turn around, and you're grown, turn around, and you're a young man with babes of your own." And he has his own child now, a funny, vivacious two-and-a-half-year old son who is the reincarnation of his dad. In four weeks, my older child, my daughter, my first-born, will be married. She did not make me laugh, but she was my clone, my companion, my singing compadre, the one who argued with her father as if they were the old married couple and not him and me. She is strong and confident. She waited a long time for the "right one" to come along. Her wedding will be a joyous occasion. And on that day, I will be thinking, "Where are you going, my little one, little one? Tap shoes and Cabbage Patch Kids, where have they gone? Turn around, and you're two, turn around, and you're four, turn around, and you're a young woman going out of the door." This replaces the lullabyes I have sung to them over the past three decades, the songs I have sung along with those being broadcast in malls that have embarrassed them, and the little tunes I have made up to honor their accomplishments--the ones they will never hear, because they are mine. Just like these children are mine. Forever. I hope they feel the same way about me.
It appears that Joan has forgotten other things, namely how to write a column for a newspaper whose purpose, one hopes, is to engage, enlighten and inform readers. Instead, this piece panders to mawkish sentimentality. It drones on, predictably, until the piece reaches its repititious foregone conclusion. Her two sons share a singular experience, she has learned to let go, she reflects. This reader yawned. This is a tiresome and trite column. Perhaps it is time for Joan to leap head first into a new life. She's had too long a time in places like the MacDowell colony to ponder life's ephemeral nature.