The Technicolor Good Stuff

It’s hard to remember exactly why I decided when I was 28 that I would die if I didn’t have a baby immediately. Within a year, I’d gone from being indifferent to the existence of babies to staring at children everywhere I went, like they might be time-travelers here to deliver me an important message. I might be able to affirm their secret identity if only they’d return my eye contact! I went from being afraid someone might ask me to hold their baby (fragile, sweaty, froglike), to being too afraid to ask to hold someone’s baby. If I held someone’s baby, everyone in the room would sense the primal hunger behind my cavewoman eyes. Embarrassing.

Primal hunger aside, it was also an appetite for novelty that had me mom-curious. I’d slept in train stations, I’d hiked through jungles. I’d worked email jobs, retail jobs, restaurant jobs. I’d drunk every PBR tallboy in my area code. My husband was starting a long graduate program that made me feel pinned in place like a rare moth in a shadowbox. Surely a fleece bunting with teddy bear ears growing out of the hood was the thing to fix my dopamine-starved limbic system.

I was determined to become someone’s mom, but I had no reason to believe I might enjoy it. Despite being almost the exact median age of first-time motherhood in the United States, I had few friends with babies. The party line wherever I turned was that having kids was going to ruin my life, but that I still should do it. I was naïve enough to think I knew better than everyone and young enough to take a big swing at a new, mysterious version of life. I had a baby the year I turned 29.

Within the same hour I could cry from frustration and sleep deprivation and feel so high on my love for him that I was sure I could levitate off of the ground if I tried.

Some of the gloomy warnings clucked at me when I was pregnant came true. What also was true is that the planet lit up in Technicolor once my baby was here breathing its oxygen. I laughed out loud at 6 a.m. for the first time in my life. One day I took 50 photos of his feet. Our scholarship of the baby created a rich shared vocabulary between my husband and me, an endangered dialect with only two native speakers through which we made sense of our world. Within the same hour I could cry from frustration and sleep deprivation and feel so high on my love for him that I was sure I could levitate off of the ground if I tried. Those transcendental meditation zealots who could “fly” in lotus position? They were probably just excited about their babies, I thought.

It’s easy to love a baby! The thing they need most in the world is the thing you can’t help but do for them: kiss, cuddle, and hold them constantly. How would it be to have a toddler? A creature with agency, who could kick and bite you, who was constantly encrusted in either snot or grape jelly? It turns out that this is when it starts to get really good.

It makes me think of a Mr. Bean episode where he goes to the beach. Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Bean is dressed in a button-up shirt, tie, and church shoes, naturally. He’s descended the hundreds of steps carved out of the cliff face only to find he is not alone at the shore. Another man is sitting there in a folding chair, thwarting Mr. Bean’s hopes to change into his tiny swim trunks free of an audience. Undeterred, Mr. Bean manages to pull his Speedo over his trousers, and then remove the trousers without ever exposing his, well, swimsuit area. There is nothing smooth about this feat. The inelegance of his contortions are so much more distracting than if he just briefly flashed the other man. I could watch it over and over again. It reminds me of my kids, and also of myself.

When my son was 3, I referred to a writing implement he held by its old school name: a Magic Marker. He trembled in awe of it. “Do we… do we know what kind of magic it can do?”

Rowan Atkinson has called his Mr. Bean character “a child in an adult’s body,” and I came to delight in the Bean-ness of my children. Like him, social norms elude them. They fidget, confounded by their bodies. Their attempts to problem-solve are catastrophic. They’re funny, but not when they’re trying to be, e.g., when they’re parroting some YouTuber and passing it off as their own. It’s when they are trying to remove leggings without first removing snow boots. It’s when they describe pubic hair as “a beard for your butt.” It’s when they call out the most unspeakable trait of an extended family member in the car on the way home and then coolly go back to reciting snake facts. When my son was 3, I referred to a writing implement he held by its old school name: a Magic Marker. He trembled in awe of it. “Do we… do we know what kind of magic it can do?”

It’s different when they reach school age, but they are still hilarious, like the viral TikTok where a 9-year-old invents the concept of a landline. I don’t have teenagers yet, but I expect them to roast me alive. I’m going to love it.

Of course kids don’t mean to be funny when they remind us they haven’t spent decades developing fine motor skills or memorizing etiquette rules. I try really hard not to laugh at them, but sometimes I can’t help myself. I see myself reflected in the inelegance of their Bean-like contortions; I’m only better at doing things than them because I’ve been in the game longer. I’m a child who has to carry ID.

I used to worry that I didn’t have much to offer children. I’m not particularly patient, I can’t do hair. I’ve learned that being inept but adult-sized is what I can offer them. I’ve done my fair share of trying to remove trousers from underneath microscopic swim trunks. Getting to coach my kids as they figure it out has been the sleeper hit of my life.

Evie's writing has appeared in Vox and The Cut. She lives on Maryland's Eastern Shore with her husband and two young children.