Margo à la Maude

Yesterday was the third tooth, today is the fourth.

This likely explains her erratic temperament over the past week, and the excessive drooling and the rosy cheeks. Just last night, she wailed in what, in hindsight, must have been the pain of the teeth breaking through. Unconsolable. When we picked her up, she was having trouble breathing through the cries, and was slapping her hand on our backs. I eventually had to pry her eyes open to show her that it was me and that she was safe. Not an experience that I was ready for, having run out of vermouth to make nerve-steadying martinis. (Yeah, never you mind the shaken not stirred schtick... just pour it in my mouth with a funnel; it'll get shaken and stirred on the way down.)

Sitting there quietly, holding the babe, it made me think of memories. For years, until Margo was born, my earliest memory was of sinking my hand in the poured cement of a new mud-scraper on the farm. I didn't understand what was going on, but my family had all done it and wanted me to do it. The date written in the cement was 1979. I was five and Bugs Bunny taught me that cement hardens in the blink of an eye and, well, to make a long story short, I didn't want to be spending my sixth through ninety-second birthdays with my hands stuck in cement at the end of the driveway.

But since Margo's birth, a new crop of memories have come, and are coming, back to me. Not memories from when I was her age, but things that she does that trigger some memory from childhood. Proust's madeleines and teacup.

Sitting there quietly, just holding the girl - who has by now realized that she's safe - her chest was still quivering the way it does after you cry hard, it all seemed familiar. And of all things, that's what brought back memories from before I was five. I had a good childhood, but at some point, all kids cry that hard, and I remembered what it was like after you cried that hard. I came out of the room a little more sympathetic to her sadness. And wishing I had vermouth.

I guess that's one of the things that prepares you to be a parent: memory and personal experience. And liquor.

Wow, sucks to be a teething kid.

- Michel

Labels: developments

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 10, 2007 at 11:07 p.m.. You can skip to the end and leave a response.