Resistance

I've been thinking today that not all of parenting is active, and that not all passivity is inert. I've been thinking about the idea of resistance, and its part in my role as The Mama.

Miss Baby has long had a somewhat annoying habit, of pushing her legs very hard against my upper arm while she is breastfeeding. Her reach, push-wise, exceeds my capacity to move my arm out of the way, so I usually just try to find a way to pin her leg in my armpit in order breastfeed in peace. She started this so young I used to tell myself that she didn't know what she was doing. But it is clear that now, at least, she does. She is pushing deliberately. She has recently taken this habit and extended it throughout her day: she pushes herself standing off my legs, she pushes hard with her arms against my chest when I carry her. The corollary to this habit is the pulling: my glasses off my face, my arm while she feeds, my ear while we snuggle, my nose when she is examining my face, my hair whenever she is able. Do not discount, either, the flailing, the lunging, and the bucking: with her arms, legs, and torso so unpredictably thrown around, there are headbutts and face-smacks and near-drops aplenty.

Her strength and speed and will astonish me. Slamming her heels hard into the change table, lunging head first from my arms into a wall, flapping her arms onto the breakfast bar, and bucking her head onto the floor while playing, she is delighting in her own physicality, but at the cost of some painful bumps. And so I hold her, let her push against me so that I can catch her if she flails too far. Let her bang her head into my nose, because I'm a more forgiving surface than the bedroom carpet. The resistance my body offers her helps her learn the limits of her own strength: it helps her know where she ends and the world begins, from the safety of a mother's embrace.

Of course, the resistance I offer to her is not all absorption of blows. No. I find delights of my own in the meetings of her body and mine. She's becoming something of a snuggler, and it's a different sense of mass and form I share with her when she melts into my shoulder, absentmindedly picking at a mole on my neck. It's another kind of resistance entirely when she sinks into me when she nurses, a different sense of the relation of her body to mine, of what it means to be distinct but enveloped. Safe.

We have begun the dance that will surely define our relationship for as long as it endures: a pushing away and a pulling closer, a friction and a joy at the boundary between me and she. And so I add 'resistance' to my The Mama toolkit. I learn something new every day.