The MotherVerse Blog: mothering out loud

All of a sudden, it seems like my 14-month-old daughter understands absolutely everything anyone says to her. Tell her anything (“Go and get your jacket, Genevieve; Wow, a big truck outside—just like your red toy truck!; Can you pick up those sunglasses—no, the ones on the floor, over by the baby gate—and give those to big sister?”); she’ll gaze at you for a moment, brain whirring, and then calmly perform whatever task you’ve requested, attend to whichever happening you’ve mentioned. Ah yes, you can almost hear her thinking sagely. Thus it is so. I feel like I could get her to make me a cappuccino, if only she was tall enough to reach the kitchen counter.

When did she learn all that language? When did she become such an agile comprehender of the world? It seems like it happened overnight. It’s such a cliché, isn’t it? How one day they’re lying gamely on their backs under the baby gym, limbs swimming haphazardly through the air, grinning for twenty minutes straight at, say, a shadow on the wall of the tree branch outside, and the next thing you know they’re correctly retrieving items of laundry from the basket, bringing them to you, and sitting down on their amply padded bottoms so you can put on their socks?

It feels a little time-warpish to me, since I can still recall the print of the snap-bottom baby-gown I dressed her in at this time one year ago—that adorable one, with the ducks, my favorite. When did she become this toddling baby with the busy, buzzing brain and the to-do list? (Which, if it were written down, would surely read: dump out all the board books; furtively eat the crayons when they look away; press my gummy palms against the sliding glass door so as to leave a track of handprints at baby height along its length; perform any and all requested tasks, so long as they ultimately lead to some sort of pleasurable reward, to show that I can UNDERSTAND EVERY WORD YOU SAY, PEOPLE, DON’T YOU KNOW?)

I can’t keep up with the speed-of-light changes of these babies. You don’t truly understand it before you have children—how they don’t only run away with your heart, but with your mind, too; how you’ll never stop being surprised and amazed and not-quite-caught-up with whatever it is they’re doing now. (Solids already? Crawling? Climbing out of the crib?)

I assume that, since Genevieve went from spacey newborn to attentive toddler in the blink of an eye, she’ll be going off to college in about, oh, five minutes or so. Which is why the request I ask of her most often, practice-drilling her newfound powers of comprehension over and over and over, is this: “Vivi, come and give Mama a kiss.”