For now, we will forgive the nightmares (so-called) because there is nothing should distract us from our happiness. As children, we are obligated to be happy. Those inconvenient moments of confusion, anxiety, terror are easily glossed over, easily treated with the rosy sheen of sentiment.
While babies smile and toddlers squirm, they worm their way into our heads, our hearts, into our dreams. My father will recount to us the emerging personalities of each of his five children. His youthful speculations of who we were, of what we would become slowly evolved into a stolid confidence. Infants are amphibians; between two worlds, they crawl out of the mire, the muck, the mother... The eyes are slits. They slowly open. These five nascent senses--so powerful, so persuasive in experience--are finding the way onto the land.
Thus, overwhelmed by light and noise, the body begins to breathe, begins to be in the world.
I taste the salt of my own tiny fist. I feel the soft cotton against my cheek and smell the extravagance of the fabric softener that my mother has justified by my arrival. I am a speechless voyeur. My own eyes, defocused and straining in the grey evening light, stare abstractly at some shadows in the corner of the room.
While babies smile and toddlers squirm, they worm their way into our heads, our hearts, into our dreams. My father will recount to us the emerging personalities of each of his five children. His youthful speculations of who we were, of what we would become slowly evolved into a stolid confidence. Infants are amphibians; between two worlds, they crawl out of the mire, the muck, the mother... The eyes are slits. They slowly open. These five nascent senses--so powerful, so persuasive in experience--are finding the way onto the land.
Thus, overwhelmed by light and noise, the body begins to breathe, begins to be in the world.
I taste the salt of my own tiny fist. I feel the soft cotton against my cheek and smell the extravagance of the fabric softener that my mother has justified by my arrival. I am a speechless voyeur. My own eyes, defocused and straining in the grey evening light, stare abstractly at some shadows in the corner of the room.
A creaking door and light invades the somber silence of my cell. Then there appears above me a crescent moon of smiling faces. Back-lit and nodding, they are a bouquet of flowers above me. I smile. They are stars. They are flowers floating in the firmament: they are love, attention, security, in full bloom.
