In the bath

In the bath, my son’s arms are strangely muscled for a little guy just 19 months old. He’s all potbelly and rippling biceps and shoulders and ribs, head still mostly bald with a sparse crop of wispy hair. He looks the same as he did in the photos of him at six months old; now he’s just at 200% scale. Also, he’s a different person now—he’s a person at all, where before he was just a baby.

A 1-year-old toddler is almost suffocatingly cute and perfect in some moments, and just plain suffocating in others. Newborns are endless bundles of needs. Young toddlers also have a lot of needs, but they also have wants, furious yearnings, with no vocabulary to articulate any of them.

At least in the tub, my son is almost always at ease, singing in tongues to the vague tune of “Wheels on the Bus,” holding a measuring cup up to his face and yelling into it, poking himself in the penis, laughing. I can’t help but form a neat narrative about this in my head: He takes to the bath because he was born in a bathtub. It was an inflatable tub in a hospital room, but that still counts. He came into the world submerged. Maybe it didn’t feel any different than my liquid womb where he swam in the shadow of my placenta. Maybe it felt more like home in that glorified baby pool than it ever would on dry land.

Tonight, while admiring my son’s muscles popping in hilarious contrast to his baby-puffy cheeks and belly, I experienced a full-body memory—for the first time in a while—that he was made in me. Him, in all his soft half-baby, half-kid splashing radiance. I remembered that he is a product of my body, a growth that started tiny and deep inside me. He is also in transition right now, right as I write this and he snoozes one room over in his IKEA crib: He stands at the portal from baby to person.