It starts off quite nice, lovely even. My wife and I will be enjoying a meal, only to hear adoring laughter, or cooing from the table behind. At this point, we’ll turn to see that my son has been staring at our delighted co-diners. We smile, too, but thinly, the way you might when someone on the tube says you smell nice. We’ve been through this before and know what comes next; a gradual unravelling of that delight as he refuses to stop staring and his subjects succumb to embarrassment, boredom and despair.
After a long time not noticing anyone, my son is now seized with an ungovernable desire to stare. Perhaps he’s figuring out personal dynamics, forging a new fascination with people – or is just an inveterate creep.
Whatever, he hasn’t learned to stop, and glares at people with Sauron’s lidless eye, well past the point of polite or quirky conversation. Even when we move him around, he continues for whole meals, or journeys. What was once a cute invitation for strangers to say how adorable he is – one of my favourite topics – has now become a tedious, nervy grind in which we are forced to apologise to anyone caught in his tractor beam.
Getting stared at by a baby is really only palatable for about 90 seconds – it’s constant eye contact from someone who doesn’t know how eye contact works. There’s nothing quite like the quiver in one’s soul from a ceaseless glare.
This is why most people lay down enough emotional repression by adulthood that, not counting eye tests, we only experience about three seconds of deliberate eye contact per week – and most of us would pay a Spotify-style monthly premium to reduce it even further. My son knows none of this so, like a cat with a blow torch, he wields its force without any sense of its effects.
Or maybe he does know. His gaze sometimes seems so deliberate and probing that reactions – in restaurants, on buses, or anywhere he can find a pair of captive eyeballs – swiftly degrade from ‘Aww, what is he thinking?’ to ‘What does he know?’ His is a stare of scrutiny, of judgment; the stare of someone who has seen your internet history and wants you to know it.
Whatever way it starts, the rigmarole ends the same way, with a gradual decline of patter between our tables, as we pretend not to hear their muttered variants of ‘He’s still looking at us’ or ‘What’s with this baby?’ We pretend not to hear them discretely turning their chairs from his pitiless gaze so they can return to the scrutiny-free company of their companions, people who’ve never looked them in the face their entire lives.
We’re sure it’s a phase, but recommend you don’t engage him for the time being. Eyes may be a window to the soul but, well, keep your blinds down for now.
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