Editor’s Note: This essay originally appeared in New York Family magazine in June 2010.
Lola will be 20 months old this month. It’s about to happen.
I know, everybody tells me, one day, out of nowhere, just like that, she’ll be talking. In sentences.
She’s at the precipice now. Words pop out, here and there, some semi-formed that only my wife and I understand (more my wife). It’s a wonder to behold. Lola beams with pride every time she says a new word.
“Didja hear that?” I say to my wife after a naked, soap-sudded Lola shifts her position in the bathtub, points to her tiny rear end and screams “Bum!” (My wife is Canadian. They borrow certain colloquialisms from the British.)
We giggle. Yet I can’t help but feel like I’m losing something.
I like the non-speech. I like the purity of it. Lola and I will have the rest of our lives together to communicate through the limited and imperfect vehicle of words. We will say “I love you” but at times it will be a rote catchall for a feeling that words cannot describe, a verbal salve to ameliorate a betrayal or discipline, a salutation that punctuates long distance phone calls or a blunt instrument that can’t nearly say enough when you wish you could say more. There will be so many words, some we’ll never forget and some we’ll wish we could take back. It’ll get more complicated this way.
You see, up until now, until Lola started finding words, there were no words between us. There was just us. What we had something no one—no parent—can really tell you about until you get there. It’s a love that resides inside you; the love a parent has for a child that only manifests once there is a child to love. It’s a dormant emotion (Query: Is love an emotion, a state of mind, a state of being?) that alters your very essence. And it’s totally wordless, yet completely felt and completely understood between parent and child.
That’s what Lola and I have been experiencing for the past 20 months. And we’ve been just fine. We’ve been indulging in a full range of non-syntactical fare: funny faces, the five S’s, touches, tears, tickles, colors, music, monosyllabic banter, and basically everything else the world has to offer. We know each other well. It takes little but profound gestures to let each other know what we need, what we feel, and that we love each other. And most of the time I watch her do whatever she’s doing and it leaves me speechless
This is not for long, I guess. But for now, I’m so good with it.
Dave Hollander writes for The Huffington Post (huffingtonpost.com/dave-hollander). You can also follow him on Twitter (twitter.com/DaveAHollander) and Facebook (facebook.com/daveahollander).
