Photo courtesy of Zachary Kurtz

Safe Skin, Safe Knuckles

They keep snatching him. I don’t get much of a chance. It’s not that they don’t trust me, I don’t think—except one night when we were crowded in front of the World Cup, when I had Great-Grandbaby on his tummy on my lap because he liked my skirt, its soft big red flowers, they started yelling. Did they honestly think I’d let him push off, like a runner does when the gun goes off, and ram his head into the lamp and knock it over and bang onto the floor, himself?

The trouble, now, is that everything goes into his mouth. In the beginning it was just his cushy wee lips making the ravishing hunger sounds or little pipsqueaks of contentment. Now he babbles to beat the band and chomps down on people’s knuckles. I’ve seen him gnawing his mother’s face, too. Faces and knuckles are good because he can’t choke.

So what’s most safe, for now, is skin like that, and his cotton blankets and burp bibs, and maybe anything handy made of silicone if it’s blunt edged. Ha, am I going to give him my spatulas? The plastic sandwich bags in my kitchen drawer would make the perfect entertainment, I think, were they not plastic sandwich bags. He could chew and chew, toothlessly, on the pliable bag, and slobber and slobber, totally engrossed, but then he’d swallow the slobber and send the poisons racing through his bloodstream. If the current collective wisdom is true, that everybody is walking around with a credit card’s worth of plastic in their brains, why are we giving even babies the stuff?

I want to think hard plastic isn’t as bad. Bone hard. But maybe I’m dreaming. I placed my clackety-clack bee within his reach, not so long ago, with orange wings, hard, and bobbing orange antennae, just as hard, which I figured he couldn’t swallow. The antenna knobs, screwed fast to metal springs, wouldn’t go down his throat. I pulled on the bee’s string to make the wings twirl, and I hovered, and I took sweet little videos of him clutching and sampling. But later, I worried. The thought of his parents seeing what I’d snapped with my phone, this gullet-size bauble slipping in and out of his mouth, unsettled me.

 

 

I went for my scraps. I decided on a piece from a worn, small dress, and another piece, but bright and crispy, possibly treated with formaldehyde. New fabrics can contain formaldehyde, or so I’ve heard. We didn’t want that now, did we? Vigorously I washed it, and the other piece, too, and when I sewed them together and pushed in some stuffing, I had him a baby-hands-size squeezable, suckable pillow.

And for more thrills, I found an old spool of thread I could tie on, wooden. I scraped and scrubbed the labels off, as well as the labels’ glue, probably toxic, probably manufactured during the Industrial Revolution. Now, lots of thread on the spool, it could unwind and unwind endlessly, and whatever lengths of infinitesimal width went down his airway, they could always be fished back up. I washed a few massive buttons to tie on, as well. No matter how slobber soaked, they would still clack together nicely, symbiotically, like the orange wings of my bee, and nurture his hearing range.

Thursday, when his daddy stopped by, I watched through the truck window the baby twitching in his sleep—the tiny pudge foot, its sudden jerk, and then the two tubby tiny hands grabbing involuntarily at the seat restraint. That’s all I got—looks at him. But Friday, baby here again, out on the porch on his auntie’s lap, nobody else within range, I saw my window of opportunity. Slipping outside, I took the closest chair and dangled his yummy in front of him.

Things went all wrong.

At least, when he sucked loose the knot in the ribbon I’d strung the buttons on, Auntie managed to seize them.

At least the soggy, unspooling thread only tickled at his toes and snarled. It didn’t coil around and around a toe and cut off the circulation.

When more family joined us, they told me I’d misjudged. They said the buttons weren’t big enough, that anything that huge could still catch in his throat. Also, why hadn’t I emptied the spool? Chastened, still in my chair, I couldn’t even disentangle the slicked thread. The baby, now on my other side, in his mother’s arms, was catching her hair in his fingers, trying to eat it. But soon she put him to her breast. He was able to wash down any formaldehyde traces with gulps of her perfect, pure milk.

I’m trying to be reliable, besides able to live with myself and any damage I cause. If my family can’t have confidence, they’ll only ramp up their grabbing and bossing and possessiveness. I don’t want to miss out.