Forward Facing
The first time you rode in my car, it wasn’t my car, and you were not quite you. It was a rental, gray or white or silver. You were just five pounds, had just passed the car seat test: ninety minutes in the car seat in your hospital room. You were one month old the first time you saw the sun.
Maybe it glinted between the cement columns in the parking structure. Or maybe the structure was enclosed, and all the light was artificial. All I remember is you: your eyes the color of a new bruise, taking up so much of your face; your turtle head, whose circumference I would fret over.
I stopped four times before we left the structure, pulling into empty spaces and twisting around to reach your infant seat. I’d bought it two days ago at a Richmond, Virginia, Target. The cheapest brand, in case this adoption fell through like the others. I put my fingers on your chest and left them there until I could feel the rise and fall of your ribcage. Then I let myself breathe too.
I got lost on the overgrown backroads, on the way to the house that was not ours.
You were pinkish and skinny in the clothes we’d bought for the other babies. The tips of your fingers were brown. You had a monkish hairline. We thought you looked a little like Rami Malek, the actor who played Freddy Mercury. You slept so well that we had to wake you up for bottles.
Who are you? I wondered, and because of what came before, I could only picture bad things. Even if you stayed with us, I could not imagine you being a real baby, our baby, our older son’s brother. I imagined you emerging from the shapeless larva stage into something monstrous, a set of problems more than a person. Or rather, I would fail to love you, and I would be something monstrous.
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You will be three in June. You do not look like Rami Malek. You are not pinkish, or skinny. This week, we turned your car seat around.
Now, for the first time, I can see your face in my rearview mirror. It is the color of your newborn fingertips; I heard somewhere that infant finger color is a predictor of eventual skin color. But it’s not as if your face is the same color as your arms, or the same color in July as it is in January.
People are always trying to predict things about babies: their gender, which parent they’ll look like, whether they’ll be full of grace because they were born on a Tuesday.
You’re Thursday’s child; you have far to go. By the time your due date rolled around, you’d already flown across the country.
In parking lots, we play a game. “Is that Mommy’s car?” I point to a random vehicle. You shake your head and smile, in on the joke. “Noooo.” “Is that Mommy’s car?” “Nooo.” Until we finally reach my dented red Kia and cheer. “Yes!”
Together we race forward. We stop when the red-and-white arms fold across the track. And now when I say, “Look! The train!” you can see it too.
The things I imagined are crumpled in the desktop recycling bin of my mind, and you are steadily overwriting them. Your opinions are loud. You want BOTTLE JUICE and SUPER DINO POWERS and PAPER TOWEL. You run with your brother and his big friends like you don’t know you’re small.
The other day you peed on the couch in the shape of a letter A. You proudly announced, “I poop it! I make letter S!”
You want to know who has a tummy. You want to know where your brother is when he’s not with you. You want to know what every button does. You want to meet every dog. You like Spider-Man and Mickey Mouse, tunnels and water fountains and things you can climb.
Once you climbed to the top of a chain link cage built to protect a set of pipes at the park. I climbed up after you, because I thought I could keep you safer if I was seven feet off the ground too. But I couldn’t get the two of us down at the same time. I tried to hook my arm around you like a lifeguard towing a drowning person. But you wiggled and I slipped and we dismounted with a sort of semi-controlled drop. You landed on your back and cried.
The next time you climbed up—stopping you was not an option—I stayed on the ground and spotted your descent. It turns out I was much more useful as a base camp than as a co-climber.
Your head is a perfectly acceptable size. It is covered in 3A curls, one long ringlet bisecting your forehead.
You have pulled me out of my dark reverie and forced me to live here, in this world: to see you as a person and not a projection. No easy task, but I know better now than to underestimate your strength.
Today in the drive-thru line I watched in the rearview mirror as your blinks grew longer and longer until you nodded forward. I parked in the shade and rolled down the window and kept an eye on the time. Your brother would be out of school soon. Until then, we were soft with trust.
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