Rainy Day Daddy Duty

Journal of the Plague Week

“Daughter,” Grace Mikell Ramsey

Today I am home with my son. Hand, foot, and mouth disease. He is doing better today, back to babbling on the move. But he still has the speckles on his body. His skin feels like premodern trouble.

He is fourteen months old. A child’s personality at this age is an assemblage of curious facts. He likes to watch the movement of water in a river and head butt the people he loves. He enjoys holding on to an apple for comfort. His word for a round fruit is “baka!” The exclamation point there doesn’t explain the half of it. If you sternly tell him not to do something, like biting family members, he wags his finger happily. The sound he hears—“no”—signals that the ritual should begin: He must wag his finger. He knows this ritual; it is now grooved deeply in his tablet of experience. To enact the ritual is thus deeply satisfying. He laughs and bites again.

He began walking a couple weeks ago. His feet still have that alien softness, the peculiar feel of unused soles, but that will be gone soon. He waves hello and goodbye and blows kisses when he walks, to no one in particular, or to something in particular that we do not know.

Parents are close readers. We are wild prognosticators. There is a low buzz of transcendence always in the background, always muted by the sudden interruption of the material. It is shocking to be puked on, even if you suspect it might be coming. The puke is not magical. It is the material expression of your magical child. It is very, very warm.

“Hand, foot, and mouth disease” needs a rebrand, in my opinion. Just the name sounds so brutal. Also, the symptoms show up all over the body. I suggest Daycare Pox.

The disease was first identified in Canada in 1957. I just read this slightly disturbing sentence on Wikipedia: “Fingernail and toenail loss may occur a few weeks later, but they will regrow with time.”

My son begins each morning by pointing at his tiny backpack hanging up on a hook and saying “ba-pa-” over and over with increasing urgency until I put it on him. He simply prefers to face the day with his backpack on. He toddles over to the recycling bin, wearing his backpack, and picks certain items out of the bin, one by one, to remove and drop on the floor. He gets to work.

The rhythm of our lives is interruption. My wife and I make plans or promises, we carefully schedule our workflow, we slot our most pressing tasks into our precious blocks of time. But then the kids get sick, oops. Our children are fast learners but we are not. We keep thinking we can plan ahead, old trick of our ancestors. We keep thinking we can script our future like the outline of a play. We never learn.

Just this second, a million neural connections formed in my boy’s brain, just like the second before, just like the second to come. The shape of his subjectivity is a mystery. I cannot extrapolate it from my own. No matter how deeply I observe, no matter how thorough the notes I take, his intelligence is foreign. Once I walked the baby’s way, but that territory is gone and irretrievable. As one day it will be for him. The facts and details are not evidence. They are not clues. They are something like decorations. This is surely part of the baby’s way: Every child has a high style. They would not leave transcendence unadorned.

The rhythm of our lives is interruption. The sound of crying is beautiful when you think about it but honestly I have never thought about it. Poop and pee, illness and injury, a wakeful night. A million minor emergencies. Look away for a moment, a million neural connections. “Dada,” he says. “Bodka,” he says, which means banana. We learn these bits even if we can never be fluent in this language that will soon be lost.

We write our new to-do lists and copy the undone to-dos from our old lists. Mostly we are just copying the list in its entirety but it feels good to have the list on a new piece of paper. In this way, we transfigure the undones into to-dos. It seems promising. It is just a ritual, after all, deeply grooved. To enact the ritual is thus deeply satisfying.

Plans and deadlines are the manners of a former life. It is a different sort of life, now—inundated with immediacy. Puke is not a disruption; puke is not transcendent. Puke is only puke.

We repeat ourselves. Repetition, too, is the rhythm of our life; repetition is a cousin of interruption. That doesn’t mean anything, but maybe you know what I mean. We are tired. Our memories are shot. When prediction is proven to be ever more futile, retrodiction seems to go dormant along with it.

Some researchers theorize that advanced planning first evolved as fish began to make their way to land. Ten million years before these ancient underwater vertebrates developed limbs, their eyes became dramatically bigger. Now if they poked their heads out of the water, they could see there were yummy invertebrate critters on shore. Underwater, there wasn’t much upside to fancy optical capabilities because of the attenuation of light; on land, better eyesight allowed an incredible distance and range of vision. And the further you could see, the more advantage there was to plan ahead. And so the alligator-fish thingies that migrated to land began to imagine possible futures. They reckoned hypotheticals involving prey in the distance, with something called the self as an actor influencing the outcome of events. Could this have been the early emergence of consciousness? I don’t know. But in any event, stuff happened. Eventually we evolved to make to-do lists.

Swimming along in the ocean, by contrast, the waters ahead and behind at much distance are unknowable to a fish, so there’s no point wasting energy on them. The fish’s cognitive bubble is the immediate. The fish reacts to stuff as it comes, moment by moment, by impulse. Eat; turn left. Parents of small children are dumb fish in this way. Our memories and plans are a fog beyond cognition; we take it as it comes. Shake off the old habits of land creatures and you’re left with habits that are older still. Best to manage expectations and keep swimming. You get used to it.

My son’s fever has gone down. We’ll see in the morning whether the last of the blisters have scabbed over, so he can return to school. We’ll see, we’ll see.

Now he is watching the rainfall out the window, his hands pressed against the glass. He narrates the action with hard consonants and open squeals. He is so enraptured by the water falling from the sky that he does not need me, or anything. I am sitting on the couch nearby, just watching him. And typing this, while I can.