The Moments - Chapter 2: Unpopular Mechanics

                I think we really start to appreciate, and even truly understand, the “mechanics” of life when we start trying to convey them as concepts and practices to a child.  When a baby is born, his or her day probably started at a different time than the kid on the other end of the hospital nursery.  Depending on multiple factors, he or she probably starts taking in nourishment other than milk in different forms and at a different point in their first several months than you or I did (or at a different point than that kid on the other end of the nursery).  Ultimately, you (the parent) and the little person whose inaugural journey through life you are hosting will figure all the details out and adjust them as his or her body, routine, and level of understanding develops.  As nice as that sounds when read as printed words, it is a loaded endeavor to participate in – for you and a baby.  Enter Joey Grimes – the kid who made learning those things and tagging along for the ride fun and enlightening.  Some of “the moments” simply come from experiencing the basics of everyday life with Joey and being a part of his learning about them for the first time.
                During Joey’s first few months of life, we spent a lot of time in the car.  Whether it was making the drive between his mother’s home and mine or taking a day-trip to Lexington to visit my parents, we logged a lot of hours on the road.  As a child is supposed to ride in a rear-facing carseat during, at least, the first year of life, I quickly sought to remedy the monotony of looking behind me or in the rearview mirror and seeing a plastic shell instead of my precious little boy.  Backseat mirror – check.  I highly recommend those.  You can safely see your child with just a glance in the interior mirror.  After a while, kids figure out the device and start looking back at you.  [So, watch your facial expressions behind the wheel.  If the person next to you at a stop sign can look at you like you’re crazy, so can your child.]  During the early months, when Joey still took multiple naps a day, he was perfectly willing to catch some Z’s while on the road and usually fell asleep quickly after the car started rolling.  The times that we learned from are the times when that wasn’t the case.  One evening, during one of our shorter times together, the traffic in Nashville was absolutely not on our side.  It was raining, every road in town was jam-packed, and every vehicle in the city was slow-moving.  In the end, we spent a solid 2 hours in the car with no destination to be easily reached.  Whether the change in the rhythm of the road or the sound of rain was to blame, I don’t know.  Perhaps it was teething pain or a lack of sleep earlier in the day.  Again, I don’t know (nor does it really matter).  All I knew was that little Joey Grimes didn’t want to doze or, at least, wasn’t going to very easily.  With the radio playing to provide a little music and to broadcast those lovely after-work traffic reports from people safely in a helicopter overhead, I tried to “talk Joey down” so that his constant cry might turn to a dull roar.  Didn’t work.  Fool that I am, I had to be reminded that Joey was not yet much of a conversationalist.  I changed the music to something without commercials and with a smooth beat to soothe him.  Again, not doing it.  My mind was racing (since my car wasn’t).  This period of random attempts to find something to calm him might have lasted all of four minutes, but it bothered me.  Wasn’t I supposed to make things better?  Ha!  Well, “supposed to” doesn’t mean “can do.”  It doesn’t even always mean “supposed to” (think about that).  I couldn’t fix the traffic, stop the rain, or definitively identify what was disturbing Joey at the moment.  Fortunately, I didn’t have to do any of those.  I just needed to keep being creative about how to ease his mood under the circumstances.  Not thinking it would do much, I started humming a lullaby as if I were laying Joey down for a nap.  It worked!  It took a few minutes, but his cries grew softer and, without sleeping much, he started to lay at ease in his carseat like it was a normal ride.  However, like the sitcom that my life often is, if I paused my humming for a second, Joey reignited the fussy machine.  The humming routine began early that night and had to continue for over an hour.  After I took Joey back to his mother, I drank an ocean of everything in my fridge to “wet my whistle.”  I’d never been so proud to be a little hoarse.  Since then, the combination of figuring out what works (most of the time; there are no absolutes) in helping Joey relax before a nap or at bedtime and his own evolution into a more mature sleeping schedule have made things a lot easier.  We’ve got a good routine but, certainly, have our share of “off” nights.  He sleeps better in my home than anywhere else now – but only because we’ve learned a lot and figured out how to handle the speedbumps.

                Teething has been another of those natural but thought-provoking things that makes me appreciate mine and Joey’s basic humanity and look at it a little differently.  I don’t remember sprouting my first set of teeth.  Do you?  If you do, good for you (weirdo).  To really put it in an understandable context, I needed to be around someone experiencing it.  Again, enter Joey Grimes.  From what other parents have told me, I think he handled teething rather well.  However, he probably wasn’t thinking that when the uncomfortable sensations in his mouth were giving him fits and making him cry.  When teething pain came along with hunger, drinking from a bottle or, later, a sippy cup served two purposes.  Sometimes, gnawing was all he wanted to do with his milk vessel.  At other times, his baby toys became like a buffet from which he took a bite of everything.  As he grew in his ability to understand and manipulate his hands effectively, he would suck or bite on his fingers to occupy his mouth.  What his abilities and immediately-available resources allowed, he would do.  As with his pre-crawling aggravation, I wanted to get into the act.  A child may be uncomfortable, but a parent should try to find a way to remind him that he doesn’t have to suffer completely alone.  With teething, I would often gnaw on my hand when he did or grab a clean teething toy and bite down while he did the same with another.  Sometimes, he would laugh at me while still doing whatever it was that helped his mouth at the moment.  Those are the moments I like the most – when he can laugh at me or with me as if it eases his discomfort, if only for a second.  Did it always work?  Of course not.  Did it truly ease his pain?  No.  Sharing those moments isn’t about stopping or easing the pain.  It’s about making the moments more bearable, because you (the parent) are the one with the capacity to understand that this, too, shall pass.  Also, the child probably can’t grasp the concept of the forthcoming Tooth Fairy yet.  See!  Teething is eventually profitable. 

                We take the basics of daily life for granted.  When I’m tired at the end of the day, I lay down and go to sleep.  When I need to go somewhere, that is too far away to walk, I get in my car and drive there.  I brush my teeth in the morning and at night and sometimes at other points, and it usually doesn’t hurt to do so.  I prepare a meal or a snack and feed myself when I’m hungry.  Where did all of that come from?  Some of those abilities did not come naturally, and none of them came at the same time as the others.  Nature, nurture, and active learning collaborated to give me the ability to do the things I’ve learned and to handle the parts of life and my body’s existence that came more naturally.  It’s fascinating to think about but only really possible to think about with any depth as we see it form in another person.  Sometimes, I like thinking about this amazing thing I see developing in my son – this thing we call life.  And sometimes, I am reminded of a line from a TV show of my youth that keeps me sane in considering the enormous complexity of it all – “Well, yeah, it makes perfect sense… if you don’t think about it too much.”