Next to my infant, my son looks gigantic, a Brobdingnagian representative of some mutant race. His eyes are so big! His hands are so facile! He generates syntax!
The funny thing is that, prior to the infant's arrival, I was sure my son was small. He is, in fact, small. And he's also measurably small for his age, skulking at the bottom of the growth curve; this fact numbers among the vast constellations of things about which I worry, a galaxy that also includes climate change and nuclear disaster and Alzheimer's and the bathing of babies and whether or not that plant I can't identify in the backyard is poison ivy.
But compared to the infant, my son is monumental. I have trouble believing he was ever as small as the baby, even though I know he was, because I was technically (if only partially mentally) there. I have even more trouble believing that his personality, his whole lollpping, silly, cautious, ingratiating self, fit inside a being as small as he must have been.
It makes me think that the baby's future self must be lurking inside her grizzling shell as well. That if I could only get past her pink and wriggling limbs, her furious blankness of face, I'd be able to see her personality lying tightly coiled inside her like a tapeworm.
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