Baby love

I’m missing my granddaughter. I saw her three weeks ago and will see her next week and she sits still enough to Skype with me for a few minutes every few days but still. This baby love is like big romantic love. It sits in the chest, leaving a hole there in the absence of the beloved.

I felt this way about my own kids and still do, to a certain extent. But the love for the adult child has shifted, like married love shifts, to solid, forever affection. The baby is like teenage first love. Every time I think of Hazel Violet, I grin.

I think, for example, of how, when she was learning to walk, she raised both fists to the sky and toddled off in all directions in sheer exuberance.

I think of all the things she could already do to “help” when I last saw her, at 15 months:

Peel garlic

Put her diapers in the trash

Put bottles in the recycle (and take them out again)

Carry sticks to the bonfire and throw them on (closely supervised, repeating “hot-hot”)

Clean up the floor, crumb by crumb

I think of her two dimples and her thick, shiny, dark hair.

I remember her astonishing appetite.

You shouldn’t talk too much about your grandkids, just like you shouldn’t talk too much about your romantic interests. You must know that the impulse to talk about the beloved can exceed the listener’s capacity to smile and nod.

I can only hope that everybody has the chance, sometime in a lifespan, for big love like this. A partner, a baby, a pet, a place.

Someone, or something, you miss dreadfully when you are separated. Someone, or something, you can’t help talking about.