Little Labors by Rivka Galchen Page B

elderly, she is wonderful with the extremely vulnerable, it is observed, she cheerfully anticipates their needs, even as, with the not very vulnerable, she can be, actually, quite difficult. I then shared a story, about my own grandmother, a woman who is not noted for her sunny disposition, not at all, but who also, like these other noted women, is really wonderful with babies; she raised her grandchildren, and even helped raise her great-grandchildren, when they were tiny. Even now, her great-grandson, a toddler—his favorite activity is to bring his great-grandmother her cane. My mother also takes babies very seriously, loves them, and when I return home after having left the baby with her, I never find them separated, either the baby is asleep on my mother’s chest, or she is sitting right next to her on the sofa, gesturing. And so on.
    Then I notice that somehow we speak suspiciously of people whom we describe as getting along unusually well with babies. As if they do not get along with adults. And I realize that I have become someone who gets along unusually well with babies too. And that I miss my baby, and am desperate to leave to return home to her.
The beginning of misunderstanding
    I sometimes feel, as a mother, that there is no creature I better understand than my child. This is probably because she can’t really say anything. I am beginning to worry, as she is just beginning to speak, that we are entering the beginning of misunderstanding. (Though I understand that it is likely that before it was only a misunderstanding that led me to think I understood.) Her words are: bubble, ten, shoes, mama, papa, eyes, up, and encore. A writer once said to me of his two children, “I found that once they started to speak, my friends lost all interest in them. Before they spoke, it seemed like they might be thinking anything. Then they learned language and it turned out they just had a list of wants and dissatisfactions.” It’s as if babies don’t grow larger but instead smaller, at least in our perception. It’s striking that in the canonical Gospels, we meet Jesus as a baby and as an adult, but as a child and teenager, he is unserviceable.
A new citizen
    When the puma was three weeks old, I brought her to the post office to apply for her passport. I brought along her birth certificate, her social security card, a photocopy of my passport, a photocopy of her dad’s passport, a notarized form signed by her dad indicating that he granted permission for his daughter to apply for a passport without his being present—I had done the research. For good measure, I brought along not one but two sets of passport photos that had been taken at a professional passport photo–taking location. Taking those photos had taken awhile. The puma had to appear in the photo alone, against a blank white wall, which sounds like a reasonable set of requirements. But the puma was not yet able to hold up her head, let alone sit, and she also did not excel at being awake, and her eyes needed to be open, and looking at the camera—these are the requirements of any passport photo—and, so, it took a while.
    Then the line for the passport application window at the post office was also very long.
    At the passport application teller window, the man in front of me was dismissed because, although he had a photocopy of the front of his driver’s license, he did not have a photocopy of the back.
    I approached the teller window and passed our paperwork through the opening beneath the bulletproof shield. The puma and I had waited about forty-five minutes to get there. I felt very good about getting this essential task done. Our paperwork was immediately handed back; the teller impassively stated: “No, her hand is obstructing her chin, this photo is unusable.”
    She did have her hand near her mouth. Triumphantly, I indicated that there were two sets of photos, that her hand was not on her chin in the