For believe me! — the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and greatest enjoyment is – to live dangerously. - Friedrich Nietzsche (The Gay Science, section 283.)

(From the Photographosophy files.)

… the kids will just end up in the backyard in diapers and bathing suits, faces unwashed, playing with sundry bits of Goodwill-bound baby equipment and also a skateboard.

We knew that Jasper was going to be Jasper for months before he was born. From the moment that we found out that he – hitherto referred to as Sprout – was going to be a he, he was Jasper. Jasper. It was a name for eccentric old English uncles, for suspender-wearing artists pottering about in skylit attics, for crusty old men with beards restoring boats and smoking pipes on pebble-strewn beaches, for boys in knee-britches chasing rabbits in heather fields. Jasper. I loved the name. I knew that it was his name with as much certainty as I’ve ever known anything.

My mother hated it. Oh, honey, she said when I told her. Oh, honey, really?

The lesson, don’t tell anyone what you’re planning on naming your child, hadn’t sunk in from my first pregnancy, when she pulled an oh honey no on Emilia’s original name, Theo. Really, Mom. And it’s not up for discussion.

But what will you call him for short?

– What does that matter, Mom? We’ll call him what we call him. Which, I thought, was a perfectly sensible response. After all, we couldn’t have guessed in advance that we’d refer to Emilia as Budge (my mother calls her Milly, Jasper calls her Maya, but she is and will always be, to her father and me, Budge or Budgie. And no, we do not know why. She just is Budge.) How could we know what we would call Jasper? That would sort itself out after he arrived.

Or not.

The obvious diminutive form of Jasper is ‘Jas’ or ‘Jazz’ – ‘Per’ doesn’t quite roll off the tongue – and we certainly sometimes call him that, but more often than not we simply spin silly variations on any word – or, as the case may be, non-word – that begins with a J. This sometimes takes a turn for the bizarre, and, very occasionally, the inappropriate.

J-Man.

The J-Bird.

The Jabberwock.

Jimbo.

The Jibbler.

Jibby.

DJ Jazzy J.

Jazzer.

Jazzer Arafat.

Jasberry Ram.

Jaspberger.

Jizzer

Jizzburger

Joey.

Joomba.

Joombalaya.

Joo.

That last one caused a little confusion on a playdate the other week. Jasper was performing some of his usual acrobatics on a swingset and, in the process, ended up upside down in some sand, which prompted me to leap to my feet and yell something to the effect of oh, J-Man! Joey! My little Joo!

Which prompted my new friend to spin on the bench. Did you just call him your JEW?

– Huh?

Are you Jewish?

– What? Oh, god, no, it’s just… he’s… I sometimes call him… I call him lots of things… you know… like…

… and I swear to god, at precisely that moment my twisted, sleep-deprived mind could only think of Jazzer Arafat, which, you know, would only lead her to think that I have a really perverse outlook on peace in the Middle East, although that would have maybe been marginally better than telling her that I also sometimes call him Jizz.

At that moment I realized that, however irritated I had been by my mother’s early questions about Jasper’s name, she had been right about one thing: sometimes, the names don’t just sort themselves out. Sometimes, you have to give a little thought to what you’re going to holler across the playground. ‘Budge,’ Emilia’s nickname, has garnered some funny looks, but I doubt that it has caused anyone to question my politics, or my sanity. And when she’s sixteen and we’re still calling her that, she’ll roll her eyes at us and protest – just as I did when my mom called me Trinky in front of my friends (she still does this from time to time) – but it won’t really be all that embarrassing, and she’ll learn to appreciate it as the term of affection that it is. But Jasper, I am sure, is not going to want me shouting Jizzer! or Joo! at his football games or dance recitals. So.

Beware the Jibberwock

As I once said (and it seems such a very long time ago now), nicknames are special names, and they are always, by their very nature, “gibberish, gobbledygook, nonsense. Words that mean nothing, but which are nonetheless utterances of affection, expressions of love in our own private language.” All of the names that I, that we – my husband, Emilia and I – call Jasper are babbled utterances of love, and even though some of them lend themselves to misunderstanding, and all of them are nonsensical, and none of them have stuck, they are all exuberant expressions of how very much we love him, of how very, very, beyond-the-reach-of-ordinary-language special he is.

Still. We should probably restrict the use of Jazzer Arafat and JizzBomb to the yard.

You don’t need to tell me your nicknames for your kids, although I’d love it if you would. And, are there any names that you’ve had to restrict to private use? That the grandparents have looked at askance? That have caused funny reactions in the playground? Or am I the only one who should be consulting UrbanDictionary before I holler at my kid?

Ain't no heart tug like a sick baby heart tug.

There comes a moment in every parent’s life when all the contrary forces of the universe collide – you are scheduled to make an appearance on a television program, say, and are rushing for the train to make it to the studio, and you haven’t yet had coffee because getting the kids to school and daycare was a frantic exercise in wrangling rabid badgers and just as you’re about to hop on that train your phone rings and it’s the daycare and your toddler has spiked a scary fever and is very sick and you need to come get him NOW and so you reverse course and hop in a cab and abandon all other obligations in favor of getting to your baby IMMEDIATELY – and, although you experience that collision as stressful, you kind of just roll with it, because you have to, and you know it, and you’re okay with it, and that, you realize, is maybe what being a grown up is all about.

Maybe. Ask me again after I’ve gone another day without coffee.

He blows kisses, and my heart, it stops.

Jasper is two years old today. Two years old. It doesn’t seem possible that so much time has passed since he was born. It doesn’t seem possible that so little time has passed since he was born. It doesn’t seem possible that this baby…

… this sweet-faced cherub with the heart-crunchingly dimpled cheeks…

… has become this boy – this precious boy – who is still so much baby, and yet, so not.

Ah, my heart.

I celebrate this day and sing this day, but this day, this day, it squeezes my heart – it squeezes it hard, it squeezes it relentlessly – because I know that after this day comes another day, and then another, and then another, and soon he will be three and then he will be four and then he will be fourteen and then forty and even though he will always be my baby he will not always be this baby, this boy, this chubby-legged sprite with the sparkling eyes and the gap-toothed smile and the ever-present smudge of crud in his dimple.

And I will miss this baby, this boy. I will miss him so much. Even though I know – I know – that I will love every moment of the man he will become, and even though I know that I have all the years of his boyhood ahead of me, my heart aches for the loss of him, the inevitable, ongoing loss as he walks his pace – steadier and steadier – away from me.

Happy birthday, baby. These are happy tears, really.

It’s wonderful, of course, that Jasper’s daycare goes to the trouble of helping the toddlers make personalized Mother’s Day gifts, but one wonders whether they aren’t also trying to send us a vaguely threatening message. Or maybe it’s a cry for help. I’m not sure:

Something along the lines of: every day after you drop off your child he turns into a huge arachno-lepidoptera and consumes the ECE assistants. Lo their bloody fingerprints! Or perhaps it’s a warning: if you do not potty train your child within the next month we will turn him into a gigantic octofly and your bloody fingerprints will be the mark of his wrath! Or something. I’m bad at coded messages.

Seriously, though: what is that?

(Hey, buddy. Why don’t you go ask your mom for some chocolate? Or cookies. Yeah. Go get some cookies, would you? Don’t make me roar. You don’t want me to roar.)

Jasper is much more blase about scary things than am I. There’s a lesson for me there, I think.

Whatever that lesson is, however, it is a lesson that I am not up for thinking about right now. Maybe tomorrow.

Jasper flees a hipster.*/**

*I’ve tried to teach him that the correct course of action when approached by Hipsterus Indomitus is to drop to the ground and curl into the fetal position, protecting his belly and shielding his “I Don’t Know Who This Is” Che Guevara onesie from view, but clearly, he has his own way of doing things.

**The term ‘hipster,’ is, according to Gawker, archaic. These creatures now go by the name ‘Fauxhemian.’ Adjust your slurs accordingly.

————

For your love and prayers and wishes of hope for Tanner yesterday, thank you. So insufficient, but still: THANK YOU.