As his hands withdrew, cold and blackened, from the fireplace, I felt like I knew my son better than ever before. Previous to this, and I’ve never admitted this out loud, when people have spoken about their baby’s ‘personality’, I feel a bit, well, sceptical.
Up until now most tracks of my child’s development have been physical, mechanical, intellectual. Rightly or wrongly, I’ve found it harder to track character development because I think of character development as something that comes much later. So when people have referred to their six-month-old as confident, smart, sensitive or whatever, I’ve been classifying these claims with those from people who see the face of the Virgin Mary in a hedge.
Or who, like my dad, are adamant their dog has human-level intelligence. By the by, if you ever do meet Sally, my father’s adorably giant dopey golden retriever, you’d be forgiven for thinking she has the intellect of a sea sponge. But I’d advise you not to mention that to my dad, since he believes she’s one of the smartest people he knows. I don’t mention this to him. Nor do I mention that Sally eats her own shite and spends 90% of her life begging for belly rubs – just like I don’t tell fellow parents I find it hard to discern a personality beyond ‘definitely a baby’.
Not that the vast resources of the internet make this any easier. When it comes to ‘getting to know your child’, parenting websites are an eternal horror. The best ones have stats and markers, but the cheerless, antiseptic blankness with which they chart progress suggests a neatly labelled container filled with fruit flies in a genetics lab.
Worse are the thousands of dreamcatcher-friendly dunce hubs, spewing algorithmically programmed pap about wellness, spirit and being true to yourself. As if my main goal in parenting is to be true to myself? Have they not considered – as I do constantly – that I might be really bad at this and need to be told exactly what to do?
But to my surprise and delight, my son has begun introducing himself to us on his own. We’ve started to note small glimmers of selfhood – repeating back the games we play with him and, it would seem, trying to make us laugh. I’m not saying we have a Peter Cook on our hands just yet – his concept of humour is to momentarily hide his face and then reappear, or to ignore our instructions not to sit in the fireplace while looking back at us and laughing. But still. It’s there.
As he cackles, we wipe the soot from his blackened hands and marvel that these minor acts of defiance show his naughty, silly self is arriving more and more each day. In terms of personality, he may not be on Sally’s level just yet, but it’s a start.
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