Caca

For months and months, you control most of what goes into your little girl. Sure, there are occasional moments where the grocery store's music system play an Eighties ballad that you'd just as soon your little baby never heard. But, still, you decide whether she'll eat squash soup or peas, and you decide when she's ready for Dr. Seuss. And that first sip of chocolate milk? The choice is all yours.

Until it's not. L. and I spent a little time this weekend trying to write down all of the words that Cleo uses, on an ordinary basis. It was a surprisingly interesting task: we came up with around 210, and they grouped themselves neatly into a number of categories (animals, of course, and foods, and parts of the body, and colors). Helicopter and octopus stood out as the most complex. And it turns out that you can successfully navigate this world for 23 months without knowing how to say either American Idol or It is what is is. But what was perhaps most notable about the list was that we'd taught her every word but one.

Which one? Well, that'd be caca, which she usually says in rapid combination with pee-pee and poop, when she decides to report on (usually falsely) the condition of her diaper (or, sometimes, on the whereabouts of a parent). So, we wondered: whence caca? And the answer, in turn, took form: from the mother of Quentin, Cleo's playmate, who speaks to Quentin in French, and who thus uses the neat Gallic equivalent for poop. You say po-tay-to; I say po-tah-to. Poop, caca. No big deal - aside from the fact that Cleo's now saying words that we never taught her, and that we never use.

And that, in turn, is a jarring fact. Just this morning, I was reading a book about modern Arab art, and I came across a candid passage by the Palestinian artist Tayseer Barakat, who was commenting on the fact that easel paintings were entirely foreign to most Middle Eastern artists, before around 1900. "We, as Arabs and Middle Easterners," he wrote, "did not know this [easel painting]... We were not accustomed to a hanged painting on a wall. From its foundation, this idea which is based on something not Arabic not Easterner, demolishes the whole creative act for us."

References to caca don't quite demolish our entire creative act. To the contrary, in fact, they usually make us smile. But they do contain, I'd hold, an element of the foreign, or the imported, and thus of the unheimlich. Cleo is almost entirely, thus far, made of what we've given her. But, more and more, she'll be made of what she encounters on her own, without us: an amazing, but also unsettling, prospect.