So close to toddling, my son resembles an almost ambulant cantaloupe or flightless bee
He’s nearly there. With the walking I mean. It’s so close we can taste it, and we’re all trying not to put too much pressure on the boy at my in-laws’ house as he gets to the final hurdle of just putting one foot in front of the other, no hands, and making it across the upstairs carpet in two strides. His hands steady him on whatever’s near – a low shelf, a passing toy, or the folds on a pair of jeans. Where once they were urgent, these grasps now seem placebic, a series of crutches rather than the actions of a load-bearing hand. He is delighted, beaming, but never once looking at his legs to observe the motion that you, at first, presume is the source of delight. His mind is not on his body at all, but on us watching him.
It’s odd to see the things he’s asking of that body as he strains to achieve bipedal motion. Watch him for long enough and you’ll cease wondering why he can’t walk and start wondering how the rest of us ever learned. It seems preposterous; a squat barrel supported by flabby little legs, those tiny, squishy feet bearing everything above them. Stranger still to think your body was once so small, untested, so mysterious to even you, that you had to learn what it was and what it wasn’t. This is a struggle for my son every day. Even when crawling, he moves like a ghost who’s just been gifted corporeal form and is shocked to discover he no longer fits through cracks in the wall. He could never be described as a wisp of a thing, even compared to medium-sized dogs, yet he trundles through life with the cocksure arrogance of a much smaller, more easily manoeuvrable object, as if he is indeed a baby, only with the mind of a bee.
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