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T A B L E++T A L K

Is there a "best age" to become a parent? Join the discussion in Table Talk's Mother's area

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R E C E N T L Y

First family on the couch
By Lori Leibovich
Therapists analyze the Clintons
(08/20/98)

An affair to remember
By Nell Bernstein
President Clinton is trying desperately to salvage his reputation. Monica Lewinsky has lost hers forever
(08/20/98)

Clinton's silvery web of words
By Katie Roiphe
Once again, the president teased us and left us hanging
(08/19/98)

Finding your inner ape
By Polly Shulman
The books in Peter Dickinson's children's adventure series "The Kin" not only look at what life was like for the first humans -- they also explore what makes us human
(08/18/98)

No baby on board
By Pagan Kennedy
Zero population mom
(08/17/98)

BROWSE THE FEATURE ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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a Melody of his own making

| E X C E R P T |

A SLANT OF SUN:

ONE CHILD'S COURAGE

BY BETH KEPHART

W.W. NORTON

NONFICTION

256 PAGES

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I tell myself we're managing. I tell myself we're happy. In the meantime, my son's terror of strangers is breaking my heart.

BY BETH KEPHART | They bring him to me just after dawn. I turn, and he is there. They show me how to bend my arms so that I can take him down toward my heart, and there is nothing else to say. The nurse leaves. I fall profoundly, madly into love, peel the aftermath of birth from my son's black-haired crown, try to slow down the shifting of his well-lashed eyes. Hey, little guy. Over here. It's me. I'm your mom. He is as light as that part of the dream that, come morning, slips away and slips away again. I bundle him tightly in the blankets provided and stare without comprehension at the nurses, who have now returned with instructions on the care and feeding of newborns. I don't believe that I will ever learn what they are trying to teach me, and I ask them quiet, obedient questions until my husband comes to rescue me and I can lobby for a quick release from the hospital.

Soon I'm being conveyed home in a rusting white Ford Mustang whose only defense against the persistent July heat involves my fiddling with the windows, cracking them just wide enough apart so as to whip up strong blasts of air. It is the hottest day of a long, dry summer, and Jeremy, one day into life, is blanketed and behatted in the car. His head keeps rolling around above his shoulders, though my husband is driving old-man slow, and I feel criminal exposing him to the heat and potholes like this, make him a promise I will never keep: "Hey, after this, no more cars. We'll walk the world."

We sleep in the same room. We lie, most of those first nights, in the same bed, my husband and I curled like parentheses around our son, barricades against the dark. There is nothing to do but to feed him when he cries and study him when he sleeps, take turns tracing the architecture of his bones. He is, for sure, a half-Latin child, so much black hair on his head that I have to snip away the sideburns, a delicate operation that seems to take me hours. It's a misconception, I'm certain, but time itself has come unscrewed. Everything is a still-life drawing; we are complete, we are immune. We sleep whenever Jeremy sleeps, and in the intervals we make formal introductions: this is yellow, this is the moon. My husband constructs a black-and-white mobile and we dazzle Jeremy's vision with bull's-eyes and swirls. When he cries, we walk up and down the hallway reciting T.S. Eliot; he concedes to the hushing persuasion of poetic anesthesia. It is all a held breath until my parents, our friends, our in-laws, distant aunts, and neighborhood children eagerly arrive and toast this child of ours to the highest of heavens. I retreat when I can to the back of the house and feed Jeremy until he seems satisfied.

After the first three weeks of Jeremy's living are concluded, after it is just me and my baby in the house and there's no one watching eleven hours every day, I begin to teach my son the only thing I know that counts: how to stand in the pulse of a song and feel it tremble. I choose my music carefully. I pillow Jeremy up on the antique rocking chair, stand but a few feet from his two new eyes, and surrender to the avalanche of sound. I call it dancing. I call it color, texture, energy, light. It is everything he'll need to know if he's to plunge into the possibility of his life. "This is music," I tell him at the start of every song. "And this is how it looks to crawl inside it." I tell him that it's reasonable to catch music with your fist. I tell him that you can wear it like a shirt. I tell him that it wasn't until I learned the trick of song that I myself could feel halfway safe upon our planet.

We find our patterns. We construct scaffolding for the days. We spend more and more time on the antique rocker, whose story I tell Jeremy between songs. I tell him how I found the chair in a thrift store on Main Street and carried it all the way home. "I was nine months pregnant and out to here," I confide. "And every few feet I plunked the damn thing down in the middle of the walk and rocked until I felt ready for more hoisting. You would have thought that someone would have stopped to help, now wouldn't you? Jeremy, wouldn't you? Or maybe passersby thought me insane." Jeremy looks at me with his more in-focus eyes, and I wonder what he's thinking, if he forgives my impulsive side, if, when he grows older, he will take me in his stride. In the midst of staring at him intently, holding him, loving him, I schedule time with a formal portraitist, but the photography session does not go well; Jeremy will have nothing to do with the bald man and his clucking tongue, his lightning-like lens. He yawns a monstrous yawn and falls implacably asleep. I pay the photographer for his time and we agree that he will not return, and then I take Jeremy out of his fancy suit and photograph him for hours in casual tees.

He starts to sing, increasingly makes sense of this thing called voice -- producing small, hesitating channels of sound, creaking and capsizing melodies. As the house begins to swell with his currents, we retire the elderly alarm clock in favor of his song, silence the car radio in deference to his solos, allow him greater latitude over the patterns of our days. A tornado storms into town: merciless. Yanking the paint off houses, hanging trees by their very necks, uprooting backyard tents and gardens, foiling wires and plans. Neighbors who did not know one another before are thrust into perfect friendships -- thrown into the streets with candlesticks, anecdotes, laughed-off fears. From the shoulders of my husband, Jeremy watches the wet asphalt, the giddy collision of personalities, the terror of the skies giving way to an exhibition of strange and wonderful cloud forms. To the mayhem Jeremy begins to sing, knotting the fragments of the hour so tight together that when the tornado is later called back to memory, it's the songs that remain in my mind's eye, a mental picture of Jeremy sitting high in the sky calming the winds with his sweet, high humming.

And then there is the day that we board the train for the city, our first such adventure, a bit of spice. It is midday, an unpopular hour for train travel, and the only other travelers journeying with us are seven distinguished black women, all of them smartly attired, each of them bearing the unmistakable aspect of dignity on her face. Outside the train, the scene goes from pleasant to morose: neat plots of yard and well-dressed buildings shifting into sunken stoops and scrambled rooflines. The thin skin of heat in the roof of the passenger car begins to descend. The proud backs of the seven women sink low beneath its weight. But from the back of the train comes the voice of my son, plaintive and full-hearted with song. One head, crowned with a proper pillbox, turns to see. Another follows. Another, until the faces of the heat-broken, city-suited women rim about him like a rough-hewn horseshoe. Hands on the sticky orange seat back before him, legs planted firm on my lap, Jeremy sings a melody of his own making, deposits from his riverbed of verse. The women straighten, lean toward us. Their noble faces betray nostalgia. Fingers tap and encourage. The heat lifts up like a sheet in the wind. "Jeremy," I say, "look what you're doing with your song," and of course he doesn't know a thing. He's just singing to these strangers on the train.

N E X T+P A G E: The babysitter says I need to let go