Something a lot better than grandstanding…

… is grand-sitting, which is what I’ve been doing for the past three days.
My grand-daughter Matilda is now eight months old, and totally adorable.
I had forgotten how much WORK baby-care can be. Yup, this reminds me (once again) just how darn wrong Thomas Hobbes was when he defined the “human condition” by saying that “men grow like mushrooms out of the ground.”
Baloney! Who looked after Thomas Hobbes when he was a baby? Who tended him, fed him, hugged him, supervised him, taught him the language in which later he would communicate and indeed make his nice easy living… Who?
Another human person, that’s who. Most likely, a female person. Most likely, his mother… And as was the case with just about all the other philosophers of the western “Enlightenment”, he completely ignored the real work that is involved in child-rearing– along with the rights of the (overwhelmingly female) people who still do it to this day.
No way you can discuss the “human condition” unless you take into account– and give due honor to– the work people do in rearing the young and tending the old, sick, and infirm. Then, once you’ve done that, there’s no way you could think that the condition of being “human” is one of being self-sufficient and meeting all other humans on an essentially equal playing field… No way you could be a market fundamentalist, either…
Anyway, I know you all want to know how Matilda’s doing. She’s amazingly fearless and determined to physically explore the world around her, using her four limbs, her mouth, and on occasion the full weight of her head.
Her legs are sturdy after kicking a whole lot both after and before her birth. So now, she’s pulling herself up onto her feet in the crib and doing some little wobbly steps of proto-walking (while hanging onto the crib bars with at least one hand.)
She’s crawling quite well, though still tentatively.
She’s amazingly sociable and good-natured, and favors everyone with a big smile.
Right now, her fourth tooth is just coming in– It’s the right front tooth on the top. Her two middle bottom teeth are well in, so her open-mouth smile is particularly adorable.
With the new teeth coming down from her top jaw, she’s evidently fascinated by what’s happening inside her mouth. So often, now, when she smiles, she does so in a coy, closed-mouth way that allows her to carry on enjoying the movements of her tongue around the inside of her mouth.
I’ve been trying to stretch her hand-using capabilities. The one hand action she’s easily able to imitate is ‘drumming’ the hand on some nicely reverberating surface. When I open and close my fingers in a kind of stylized “bye-bye” hand-wave, she doesn’t yet imitate me by raising her hand in the air, but you can see her starting to work (in this case, a little more than twitch) her fingers.
When I sing her the French children’s song “Ainsi font, font, font, les petites marionettes… ” with the twirling-hand hand-gestures that go with it, she is always, without exception, fascinated by my turning hands. (Okay, most likely not by my singing voice.) But while she watches my hands closely, she doesn’t (yet) seem to be making any attempt to imitate the gestures.
I am fascinated by the whole theory of mirror neurons and the role they may or may not play in mimetic learning.
But mainly, I’m just really amazed by this whole process of grand-parenting. Thoughts of human continuity, appreciation for my foreparents, and concerns for the world that this little girl is going to be becoming an adult in all come crowding into my head.
I had a small number of these “universalist”-type thoughts back when I was the mother of small kids. But that situation was one marked by so much sleep deprivation, uncertainty, anxiety, and just plain stress that I really did not have time to dwell on those thoughts much, or articulate them in any focused way.
Grand-parenting: I can’t recommend the experience highly enough. (And if you don’t have grand-babies of your own to play with, remember there are always plenty of babies in tough home and community situations who need your loving attention in places other than a family member’s home.)