(Post-foetal yellings)

(told off, while the placenta’s still wet)

What can an infant know? Certainly not the language of adults. But don’t think it an animal or a fool.

There is a story of twins, who broke the womb of their waiting incoherent-with-pain mother. One arose first, emerging with a beauty and gentleness, not even yet beginning its inaugural scream. But then its brother, unpleased with certain placements and orders and even implications, did reach forth from the land of “unknowing” and pull the vanguard sibling back into the soup, as it were, and did promote himself first fully into the world of men. And lest there be any confusion of who was pre-eminent of that particular batch, the midwives tied a rope around the strong hand that made its determinate move. For in that period, the first to come out could be kings and land owners and those to wear the other titles of dying fathers.

But that is not the story of my son. I just wanted it known that when he finally agreed to succumb to my pushes and leave the realm of my internal embrace and find the cold and open spaces of our world, well, it can be said no other way but that he scolded me.

“You didn't do that right”, is what I’m sure he said. “Have you no idea how to properly navigate contractions, woman?” All this he challenged with an angry, but not unloving voice. I believe he even shook a finger. But I could have imagined that.

Already exhausted and weak, as you might imagine, I didn’t really have the presence to laugh my head off the way I would later at his little audacity. Whatever natural drugs were pounding through my body, midst all the messy exertion, did not even permit a proper wonder. But there was some awe that he hadn’t cried like a normal babe. There was no lack of intelligence or tender need and dependence, at least not in the expected way. I really can’t describe it another way, but that he was didactic.

I remember it said that John the Forerunner did leap in his mother’s belly when encountering the proximity of our Lord, even through all those layers of skin, blood, food and tissue, not to mention the three feet of open air between the women and their abdomens. Plus to mention the foolishness of babes.

But isn't that the issue. Are they really simply soul inert down there. Or are they thinking? Ideas ruminating? Why else did I talk and sing to mine while he tested out sleeping positions down there in my innards? Or how could he respond when I told him mama needed to rest a bit.

But scolding? That bit I’ll tell you confused even me. For I hadn't sought to compromise him. And what did he know of the proper way a mother should time her body’s rhythms. It is true that my first two children came out way early. But he was on schedule, and what could he have known of them?

Maybe I was a bit impatient. But do not dare to speak to a woman of the duties and relative safety of bringing their mancubs into this world. Don’t try to decide for them about epidurals and breathing. Don’t even interject about the curses of Eve. For we know our positions, even like my child, who told me off before I’d properly wiped his tiny face.

You can not know Eve’s journey until you’ve taken it.

But somehow it occurred, believable or not. My little son did tell me off, with proper respect, but with judgment all the same. I look at him still, wondering what knowledge he had, and how much more his little eleven year old body has now. The world is not how we imagine it. It just isn’t.

What makes a little person anyway? Is it prayers? Is it the mood we were in when we made love to our husbands the night the child was conceived. Or words that got spoken while the pup was just a seedling, and it’s earlets still developing?

Who can speak to such things? But I’ll conjecture just a slice longer. Maybe God decides what goes into a spirit long before we have a cotton-picking thing to do with it. Like His ancient knowledge of land, curses and blessing for all that he witnessed transpire there, millennia and millennia ago. I just don’t know.

I only know that my son woke me, as I tried to pass out from all of the energy demanded to drag him into our fray. My son woke me and simply said “you could have done that better. You could have been more thoughtful of my feelings. Isn’t that what a mom is supposed to do? To gently pave my way into this heaven and hell.” And that’s what he said. I didn’t argue with him.

How would you do that anyway? Argue with a human who speaks a crying babbalect of gurglish noises, who weighs just a smidgeon?

It’s a problem to me, how just a few seconds ago, he was . . . . My body. My care. Mine to decide what to do about. Mine to feed, My own to teach to about everything.

And here he is now, no longer tied to my brain and my feeding tubes. And he’s telling me off.

I’d be angry as all get out. If I didn't love him so much. Angry as all get out, if I didn't privately think he was right. I didn't do that right. I hardly do anything right. I didn’t only think about him, as I struggled to find the portal, to let him out, to let him breathe our air.

But he’s a baby. How could he know all of that?