Page 61 - 04_May-2025

Love Letters
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Party Crasher
Culture
Love Letters
A STARTLING
BEAUTY
I was never charmed by babies, but then Zooey
arrived — and suddenly baby-love felt specific,
personal and entirely mine
by LIZZIE DERKSEN
illustration COLTON PONTO
SOME PEOPLE ARE BABY PEOPLE. They start
cooing while passing the infant apparel section. They
volunteer to babysit at the first whiff of human growth
hormone. They confidently inform new parents of the
universal joys and tribulations ahead.
I am not a baby person. Other people’s babies are . . .
fine. I don’t need to hold them. I don’t care how much
they weighed at birth.
I did, however, just have a baby, after trying with
my husband much harder and longer than even I
expected. I couldn’t say why I wanted “a baby” enough
to buy a fluoride filter, take my temperature every
morning for seven years.
Our son, Zooey, is seven weeks old at the time I’m
writing this. Now that he’s here (“earthside”, as they say,
as if he hadn’t been in my body the whole
time), there’s no reconciling my feelings
with the baby people’s generic expressions
of love. I find something impersonal in
their comparisons of Zooey to a little
prince, a little angel. I feel a flattening of
my own experience in their gushing reveries
over the smell of babies’ heads. As if
babies’ heads were interchangeable. And
yet, what do I expect them to say? Even I
can’t describe Zooey, or my love for him,
in language precise enough to satisfy me.
But let me try.
I love Zooey when he suckles. In
German, there is a word for civilized
eating, isst, and for the joyful, furious
rooting of an animal, frisst. Zooey frisst.
I love Zooey’s supreme dignity. Is it
animal, or alien? Whichever, it’s entirely
unselfconscious, a mode of being that
makes adults look like shame-stricken
dunces sitting in the corner.
I love Zooey’s tropism toward light
— the windows, the lamps — both still,
equally, portals into other dimensions. He
veers at them with the same look of ex-
pectation, demanding … something. And I
chide myself for the way I have learned to
look out at the world expecting nothing.
I love Zooey’s dramatic interludes. He
flings his head away from my breast, one
hand snaps up to his brow, and he tucks
the back of his other hand under his
chin, closing his eyes and flicking out his
fingers in dismissive ecstasy: a venerable
mime; a Shakespearean fool, brimming
with bathos; a smug little seal.
I love Zooey staring, mesmerized, at
the contrasting line between the wall
and the ceiling, reminding me that I too
can choose to see everything new, to
recognize myself in the world’s startling,
specific beauty.
Not the beauty of “babies”, or the
beauty of some ideal of motherhood, but
the beauty of Zooey’s face.
Before he was born, I was told to pre-
pare for something purple and misshapen,
screaming, covered in gore. How did I
know that my husband and I were waiting
for someone, calm and pristine as I lifted
him out of the water? We instantly
recognized each other. ED.
This is our first in a new series of essays by Edmonto-
nians reflecting on human connection. Pitch your little
love story to [email protected].
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