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.)

5 thoughts on “Something a lot better than grandstanding…”

  1. Helena,
    I read everything you post, but I have to say this posting is the best ever. It does remind me of a joke from the UK, “Why do grandparents and grandchildren love each other so much? They have a common enemy!”
    This is a great post, and so uplifting.
    Paul

  2. Here is a present for Matilda, a jolly dancing song for a little girl, in a great performance. Go to:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2F_qFwsORk
    Debout, debout!
    For other universalists: “Thousands of Zelaya supporters are apparently dodging bullets in the streets, which is sort of like Twittering, for poor people.” See BoRev at:
    http://www.borev.net/2009/06/national_news_outlets_bring_th.html
    And for photos for contrast and comparison as betweeen Tegucigalpa and Tehran, got to:
    http://incakolanews.blogspot.com/2009/06/honduras-photoshow.html
    That one is not for Matilda. But note that one of the commenters on that page is saying that it is quite normal to have troops on the streets of Tegucigalpa threatening people with assault rifles. No doubt that is also the reason why the US and Brutish governments have not yet “condemned the violence” as they did in the case of Tehran.
    The Counter-Revolution Will Not be Tweeted! (See Counterpunch for that one).

  3. A wonderful dissertation, Helena. There has to be a spiritual side to that infant love. How can anybody have feelings of war, hate, revenge or killing when these little ones are involved ?

  4. Helena,
    Lovely post. As the father of a rambunctuous little three year-old girl, I can identify with this statement: “I had forgotten how much WORK baby-care can be.”
    Enjoy!
    QN

  5. How can anyone have feelings of hate or revenge?
    Here is a story about little ones, just around the corner from Honduras too:
    “U.S. documents also chronicled developments as members of GAM became targets of government violence themselves. GAM members suffered the worst period of violence during Easter “holy week” in 1985, beginning with the kidnapping of senior member Héctor Gómez Calito, whose tortured and mutilated body was found on March 30, 1985. According to one U.S. Embassy source, agents from the Detectives Corps of the National Police had been gathering information on Gómez in the days leading to his abduction. Two weeks before his disappearance, Chief of State Oscar Mejía Víctores publicly charged that GAM members were being manipulated by guerrillas and questioned the sources of their funding. Following his murder, GAM co-founder and widow of missing student leader Carlos Ernesto Cuevas Molina, Rosario Godoy de Cuevas, who had delivered the eulogy at Gómez Calito’s funeral, was found dead at the bottom of a ditch two miles outside Guatemala City, along with her 2-year-old son and 21-year-old brother. While the government claimed their deaths was an accident, Embassy sources discounted the official version of the events, and claimed that Godoy was targeted and her death a premeditated homicide. Human rights monitors who had seen the bodies reported that the infant’s fingernails had been torn out.”
    File that one under Reagan

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