Babies need baths for roughly the same reasons that fraternity kitchens do: weird spills, late-night accidents, and inexperienced and occasionally exhausted roommates. So every few days we haul out the bright green baby tub, set up shop in the kitchen, and scrub Cleo down.
It's a ball. First of all, there's something simply right about summer, water, and total nakedness. As my first witnesses, I'd call Thomas Eakins' adolescent creek divers, Bouguereau's waterside nymphs, and a young fisherman painted at Akrotiri to the stand. But, really, is there any need for witnesses? Lolling naked in a warm body of water simply feels right. And Cleo has begun to realize this, too; although her smiles are still fleeting and often seemingly unintentional, she's at least calm and composed as we wash her back and (more embarrassingly) the folds in her neck.
Okay, then: so she likes water. Most babies do, shout the heckling old men in the loge box. What is the bigger point? Well, here you go. There's a fun little piece by Jill Lepore in this week's New Yorker. Nominally a review of two recent books on parenthood, it struck me as I read it (in tiny segments, over 45 minutes, as I tried to walk Cleo to sleep) last night as more of a meditation on memoirs and on writing, really, than on parenthood. Essentially, Lepore seems to be wondering why, and how, one writes on something like parenthood.
A fair question - and one that has occurred to your faithful blogger, as well. In fact, anyone who writes on parenting probably realizes two things very quickly:
1. It's pretty amazing.
2. Pretty much everyone has experienced, or will experience, it.
In that sense, writing on parenting is something like writing about high school, or even about buying a new house. Memoirs about parenting are not, by definition, like those airy accounts of teaching Nabakov in tense Tehran, or of founding public schools in remote corners of Pakistan. Granted, writers who do write on parenthood often do try to emphasize the uniqueness of their experience: their remarkable shortcomings as mothers (Ayelet Waldman), or their experience at an allegedly transitional moment in history (Michael Lewis). But these angles often seem more like camouflage erected to conceal the commonness of the subject at hand than truly defining circumstances. In the end, in other words, a baby bath is a baby bath: it has its own peculiar charms, but it's hardly earth-shattering.
So why keep reading? Well, Lewis, Waldman, and Lepore have their own answers to such a question. As for me, I'll quote a passage from the preface to Domenico Scarlatti's Essercizi, a series of brief studies on the harpsichord that have kept me occupied over the past couple of days. "Show yourself more human than critical," wrote Scarlatti, "and then your Pleasure will increase." Cleo's just three weeks old, and nothing she does alters the world, but if you can't see the beauty in a baby, naked, in the water, then you're missing something nevertheless.
It's a ball. First of all, there's something simply right about summer, water, and total nakedness. As my first witnesses, I'd call Thomas Eakins' adolescent creek divers, Bouguereau's waterside nymphs, and a young fisherman painted at Akrotiri to the stand. But, really, is there any need for witnesses? Lolling naked in a warm body of water simply feels right. And Cleo has begun to realize this, too; although her smiles are still fleeting and often seemingly unintentional, she's at least calm and composed as we wash her back and (more embarrassingly) the folds in her neck.
Okay, then: so she likes water. Most babies do, shout the heckling old men in the loge box. What is the bigger point? Well, here you go. There's a fun little piece by Jill Lepore in this week's New Yorker. Nominally a review of two recent books on parenthood, it struck me as I read it (in tiny segments, over 45 minutes, as I tried to walk Cleo to sleep) last night as more of a meditation on memoirs and on writing, really, than on parenthood. Essentially, Lepore seems to be wondering why, and how, one writes on something like parenthood.
A fair question - and one that has occurred to your faithful blogger, as well. In fact, anyone who writes on parenting probably realizes two things very quickly:
1. It's pretty amazing.
2. Pretty much everyone has experienced, or will experience, it.
In that sense, writing on parenting is something like writing about high school, or even about buying a new house. Memoirs about parenting are not, by definition, like those airy accounts of teaching Nabakov in tense Tehran, or of founding public schools in remote corners of Pakistan. Granted, writers who do write on parenthood often do try to emphasize the uniqueness of their experience: their remarkable shortcomings as mothers (Ayelet Waldman), or their experience at an allegedly transitional moment in history (Michael Lewis). But these angles often seem more like camouflage erected to conceal the commonness of the subject at hand than truly defining circumstances. In the end, in other words, a baby bath is a baby bath: it has its own peculiar charms, but it's hardly earth-shattering.
So why keep reading? Well, Lewis, Waldman, and Lepore have their own answers to such a question. As for me, I'll quote a passage from the preface to Domenico Scarlatti's Essercizi, a series of brief studies on the harpsichord that have kept me occupied over the past couple of days. "Show yourself more human than critical," wrote Scarlatti, "and then your Pleasure will increase." Cleo's just three weeks old, and nothing she does alters the world, but if you can't see the beauty in a baby, naked, in the water, then you're missing something nevertheless.
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