Dressing my Baby

When I lay her down on the changing table, she looks contentedly at me. I wonder, and a sense of guilt pervades the question: Do I ever pay as much attention to you as when I change your clothes? Do I ever focus just on you, just on you? She kicks and squeals and slobbers as I pull her arms out of the sleeves of her shirt. After I peel the tight neck of her shirt up over her face, she blinks, looks up at me with squinted eyes as if to ask: "Is it over? Will you be scraping anything else over my face?" Or maybe, "Did something just change?"

She is always excited to have her diaper off. I wipe her legs, her genitals, her back with a soft, warm, damp cloth, and she relaxes. The new diaper I fold in half and wave above her like a fan to dry her off so that for a short while, until she wets herself again, she will be totally dry. She shivers as the wetness evaporates and cools her skin, she pulls her arms, bent like chicken wings, in against her chest, goose bumps raise up across her skin. When I put the diaper under her back and snap it closed around her legs, I am amazed at the size of her thighs, round and fat, a fat-wrinkle roll halfway between her hip and her knee curving in an arc most of the way around. All this mass, all this body, that mind, that head, those legs, those fingers, those eyes, simply from the time she spent in the womb and now spends at her mother's breast.

After I pull her pants on, up her legs, past her clammy, flex-toed feet, I wait to put her shirt on. I run my fingers lightly over her belly, her arms, her back. She relaxes again, coos lightly, drops drool over her chin. Her skin is smooth like well-kneaded, half-risen bread dough. She feels my touch. I hope she knows I love her. When I put her shirt on, I have to pull her arms away from her body again to get them through her sleeves. She resists, so I give her a finger to hold onto and that makes it easier for her. Again, when the neck of the shirt is drawn across her face, she blinks, looks around uncertainly, wonders, perhaps, if the world is new again.

With her shirt on, she is mostly dressed, but I hesitate to put on her socks and instead I take each ankle between my forefinger and middle finger and begin tapping with my thumbs on the bare soles of her feet--left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right--while I quietly sing her a song to the rhythm of the tapping. I do not sing well, but I hope that, as her mind grows, this triangulation of left-sound-right will help her understand things, will later help her process the difficult things, the awful truths, the deep frustrations, that will come her way in the future when she reaches adulthood and realizes the confusion doesn't leave with adolescence. Maybe I can help her develop a strong corpus collosum. Maybe I can give her some advantage in life. Maybe something I do will make a difference.

Is this a father's blessing?

And then I push her feet into the socks, straighten the stretchy fabric into place, and give her to her mom. As I watch her cuddle the side of her cheek into that comfortable space between shoulder and neck, I know I have just experienced life.