Or maybe it'll be 500 feet tall, have soft pink skin and wispy hair, and it will babble pleasantly and just blunder into things.
Eva of course is not yet at the stage where we need to punish her for anything. The extent of her rebellion so far is to look you mischievously in the eye, giggle and reach for whatever is in front of her (and usually put it in her mouth). There's nothing to punish. Our main job is to keep her from hurting herself (and the one time I've honestly yelled at her was when she was going for the electrical plugs beneath my desk).
About that. My earliest memory is from when my mother told me I was about 14 months. I nearly electrocuted myself. It's a bit strange. I remember it because it was traumatic, but what's strange is that I remember several seconds leading up to the trauma, not just the trauma itself. Why does the brain work that way? I have no idea.
The memory plays like a film in my head, and seems to have that ambered black-and-white character. Images are coherent and recognizable, but still indistinct, as if due to lack of color. One color, however, did stand out: bright blue. That in a moment.
I remember crawling along the floor, under the kitchen table. There was a set of keys there, apparently my mother's. I remember picking them up, looking at the socket on the wall (not knowing it was an electrical socket, of course), and thinking, "These look like they'd fit pretty nicely in there." So I put one in.
I could see the St. Elmo's fire around the key and my hand--the bright blue arcing--and looked up to my right to see my panicked mother running over to bat me away from the wall.
That's all I remember.
Obviously I survived, and you can insert any kind of joke you'd like (as a substitute for the you-must-have-been-dropped-on-your-head-as-a-child variety). Still, that's not the kind of experiment I'd like my own baby to try. So I really meant to scare her when she approached the outlet.
So far, that's about all the punishment she's needed. (Well, then again, you might want to ask Kate about Eva's tendency to bite when she's frustrated...but even then, it's hard to think that the little girl is trying to cause harm.) For now anyway, she's innocent, if not always happy.
The destructive power of a baby is pretty small, at least directly. A small child can start a chain reaction of things, such as pulling a tablecloth down with other things on it, or tipping a pot or a plate off the edge of a counter, or even pulling a whole shelf down if it's not very stable. When we babyproofed our apartment, aside from the standard outlet plugs and cabinet locks, we firmly wired our heirloom shelf to the wall, because it was a prime candidate for Eva to (a) pull herself up to standing postion with, and (b) pull down on top of herself.
Next after that was the basement door, with those steps down to the concrete wall and floor which terrify me. If even I were to fall down them I'd wind up pretty badly hurt. So even when the door was always shut, I mounted one of those security door chains on it, about six feet off the floor, so that even if Eva worked the door handle open, she'd never fit through. Now that the cat's back, and we keep the door propped open so he can reach his litter box downstairs, the chain is an absolute necessity.
Eva's learning lessons about behavior now, when Kate and I aren't even involved. Now that the cat is back, he's here with Eva. That's a new dimension to his life, since she learned to crawl, and it's one he doesn't really enjoy. I remember how cruel I was to our tuxedo cat Simon when I was a small boy. It wasn't that I hated him, at all--I liked him, but I also liked provoking him to get a reaction. And that's the problem with cats--they aren't scary. Even a moderate-sized dog, say twenty-five or thirty pounds, can bare its teeth and earn the respect of a child. Cats, not so much.
Eva is a gentle baby--she doesn't like pain so she does things carefully--and she adores animals. Every time Jasper walks by she follows him with her head and says "ki-tieh". And she's learning, with steady lessons from Kate and me, to pet him very gently. But it's altogether too easy for Eva to start whacking him instead, and grab for things like the tail, or an ear, or some whiskers. Or even for her to simply chase him all over the place, rooting him out of hiding spots and driving him from one room to the next.
I've got to say, I'm extremely impressed, and a little humbled, by that cat's patience. He's behaving like the classic floppy family dog who absorbs all mistreatment. Most cats I know would have stuck up for themselves in some manner long before Jasper has. And he still has all his claws...
Well, Saturday night things came to some kind of head. With the apartment largely secured, Kate and I feel comfortable letting the baby wander into an adjacent room, and we merely keep our ears peeled for either a big noise or an overly long silence. And that night, there was silence, followed by an explosion of cries from the baby.
Kate was in there in less than two seconds, ahead of me and she was diving for the baby on the floor on the other side of the kitchen table. I noticed the cat hustling out from under the table and out of the room, where we'd just run in. Eva was in a full-steam panicked cry, but we searched her face and most of her body and found no marks, no blood. It seemed the cat had done something to scare her, but hadn't actually broken skin.
And I thought that was good--if Jasper batted at her face, but didn't harm her physically, maybe Eva would learn to give him a wider berth, without needing to be actually hurt in the process. For the one day since then, she's seemed slightly more deferent around him, not nearly as quick to chase him down and slug him. In his reluctant way maybe the cat did teach her a lesson.
So we have this occasionally whirlwind little baby--one of her favorite sports is to flop back and forth across the couch, from one armrest to the other and without regard to the drop on one side. Of course, that means Kate or I play stopper, and prop her up when she comes near the edge. It's kind of Eva's version of swimming laps, or something like that, I suppose. She does enjoy a good faceplant into something soft.
So really, to complete the image of a gigantic infant bringing untold destruction on the world, the monster would have to do significant damage to itself as well. You know, level a mountain range and skin its knee in the process. Destroy New York but scrape its belly on the Statue of Liberty, and crawl in a bawling rage off to Chicago where it would sweep the downtown violently aside.
This kind of destructive angel would wind up sitting, job finished, in plaintive tears waiting for God to lift it back up to heaven where things are much less painful. An angel more self-destructive than destructive. Maybe not the most effective of biblical images--it's not quite as severe as the author of Revelations was trying for, perhaps--but who are we to judge the inscrutable?
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