You held the baby

We are driving south to school on the JFX, surrounded by brilliant sun. If we had a convertible, the top would be down; if we were in a movie, we would be somewhere just outside Malibu. As Cleo plays with a doll, claiming that she gave birth last night and that we may need some small new diapers and soon, I turn on the radio, and we hear Sinead O'Connor, singing 'The Emperor's New Clothes':

It seems like years since you held the baby
While I wrecked the bedroom

Well, I'll go along with that. Because nowadays it's Cleo, more often than not, wrecking the bedroom by flippantly discarding her tiny clothes in little pools across the floor and small deposits on her chair. But, that said, it's also Cleo who helped me clean the house last night, carrying her rustling dresses - rich signifiers, in some narrative that I can only partially decode, of a complex palatine life - upstairs, and collecting tiaras and crowns into a tidy cardboard box. And, come to think of it, it's now Cleo, too, who holds the baby. It's been years, indeed, since she was any sort of baby, and you, or I, could hold her in our arms. That story is past, long gone.

All I want to do, continues O'Connor, spent, is just sit here
And write it all down and rest for a while.

And again, I concur, nodding quietly as we flow south above the river, and Cleo, almost five, attends to her baby's imagined needs.