baby

I think about babies a lot. 

I think about the soft spots on their heads, and how the heads themselves would just swivel around erratically on their little necks were there not kind hands to support them. I see babies on the street, and in cafes, and on airplanes, shitting themselves and screaming and being allowed to. I think about how much babies need from adults, and sometimes that thought is overwhelming. Mostly because when I look at a baby, I think about the fact that one day it will grow up and still need things.

There's a famous baby study from the 70's called the "still face experiment." In the experiment, a baby sits in a high chair in front of its mother, who is at first instructed to engage her child in every way possible. The baby points, the mother looks; the baby smiles, the mother laughs; the baby pushes a toy car towards the end of the table, the mother sends it back the way it came.

Then, after a few minutes, the mother stops responding to the baby entirely. She sits, looking at the baby with no discernable expression. The baby continues to engage with her -- pointing, smiling, pushing things around on the table -- but the mother is non-responsive. The baby grows confused, and then anxious, and then downright hysterical, thrashing in its seat, screaming and flailing.

The "still face experiment" has been replicated hundreds of times. Hundreds of hysterical babies have sat in similar seats, desperately trying to change hundreds of unrelenting blank stares, their nervous systems overloading until, finally, a lab assistant comes in to draw the session to a close.

It's becoming increasingly difficult to rationalize to myself that I am not a catatonic baby.

I don't throw tantrums, or even really cry all that often. My infrequent experiences of rage are often neutralized through quiet conversation with myself. I'm a patient of extremely expensive trauma therapy and it's working.

But when I am alone, I boomerang between apps, checking my engagement and messages over and over again, opening the eternal internet fridge to find the same raw ingredients I left in there only moments ago before idling in my own restless state of emptiness. It is inappropriate for me, at my age, to become hysterical in response. But if it were appropriate, I think in those moments I could rip the paper right off of my walls. 

Last week I ordered a set of very expensive perfumes. I have so much free time on my hands that deliveries have become a way of tracking the days, so even though it shipped from France, I've been checking the order number since I got the confirmation email, anxious for its arrival to signal that another week has indeed gone by.

The package was scheduled to arrive three days ago. It's confusing mostly because USPS seems to be taunting me, saying that it's out for delivery every morning of the past week. Given the unreliable information, I've taken to periodically shuffling down to the apartment lobby, only to look around at the same 4 packages that have been collecting dust and toying with my emotions for days, reminding me that other people have more important things to do than sit around and wait for mail.

It's causing me more grief than I would like to admit. In my refreshing of the tracking page I sometimes wonder if maybe my package is being shipped to another person, a real person, while I loaf around in my fake apartment as a fake person who can't even read the language printed on the supposedly-en-route perfume bottles. I am a baby, toddling back to my door empty handed, languished and despondent at the non-presence of my precious products. 

The worst part of it all is that I know, when the perfumes do arrive -- and God willing they do -- I'll play with my new toys for all of three hours, smelling and trying and imagining, before dragging myself back to the lobby of my brain that is furnished with the white noise of boredom and lack. The great mother of consumerism, once again, will have failed to respond adequately to her petulant daughter.

Sometimes I see those areal swings made for autistic children that swaddle you in a tight fabric grip and think, I want that. Or a weighted knit blanket that could anchor me to my bed and mimic the hand of God. Sometimes I want someone to tell me what to do with all these days ahead of me, someone to push the plastic car back in my direction. Sometimes I want someone to just treat me like the baby I am.