Vibes miasma
I don't want our terrible world sneaking into my baby's malleable brain
My baby recently learned to smile. I say recently even though now it’s almost half his lifetime ago, but that’s how time works in these early days, it’s stretched out and strange like with space travel.
Anyways, he smiles a lot these days. He smiles at us when we change his diaper or make high-pitched baby noises and sometimes he even just smiles at the ceiling fan or in his sleep. Mostly he smiles when we smile at him, so I have been making an effort to smile a lot for his sake.
I don’t know if the smiling means he’s happy almost all of the time or if he smiles so much and so widely because that’s one of his only social skills so far. I hope the smiling means he’s happy, he definitely looks happy.
I worry frequently that the terrible state of our world will infiltrate our home like poison gas and seep into his brain somehow. I know this will happen eventually, at least somewhat—that he will someday have to understand how cruel and corrupt and stupid everything can be—but right now, while his brain is still setting like custard, I don’t want the bad vibes around him.
Not that I’m doing a great job keeping them away. Sometimes when I’m nursing him I scroll Twitter one-handed (I know, I know, this is not the right activity for the middle of the night or any time really). There, right next to his downy little head, is a constant stream of terrible news. Could the bad vibes somehow leap off my phone screen and into his gray matter? Are the evil phrases “hantavirus cruise ship” or “Kristi Noem” imprinting on him in some way?
Even if I could quit the scrolling, the bad vibes would still slip in through the cracks. Netta was laid off this week, a little over a month before she was supposed to start her parental leave. I don’t want the baby to sense any of our anxiety about money or health insurance or job hunting. I don’t even want him to hear us talk about it in case the edge of stress in our tones brings him down from baby la la land where he seems to be enjoying himself.
When we drive somewhere together, I don’t want the rudeness of another driver who cuts us off at an intersection to seep into his body like secondhand smoke while he smiles to himself in his carseat. When he sleeps on my chest while we watch TV I don’t want the commercials for gambling websites to leach into his dreams.
Mostly I wish I could protect him always, which of course is not a new or revelatory thing to say about an infant. There’s more to write about this, of course, but right now while he is still so fresh and new and just beginning to become himself it still seems possible that he could experience only nice things, that I could keep the bad vibes from reaching him, at least for a little longer.
