Baby Essay In English

[Michael Rosiles]

sI walk out the street entrance to my apartment, a kid in maroon high-tops and a startling haircut approaches, saying "Hi gorgeous." Three weeks ago, I would have assessed the degree of malice and made ready to run or tell him to bug off, depending. Today, instead, I smile, and so does my 4-year-old daughter, because after dozens of similar encounters I understand that he doesn't mean me but her .

For several months I've been living in Spain, and while I have struggled with the customs office, jet lag, dinner at midnight and the subjunctive tense, my only genuine culture shock has reverberated from this earthquake of a fact: People here like kids. They don't just say so, they do. Widows in black, buttoned-down c.e.o.'s, purple-sneakered teen-agers, the butcher, the baker, all have stopped on various sidewalks to have little chats with my daughter. Yesterday, a taxi driver leaned out his window to shout " Hola, guapa !" My daughter, who must have felt my conditioned flinch, looked up at me wide-eyed and explained patiently, "I like it that people think I'm pretty."

With a mother's keen myopia, I would tell you, absolutely, my daughter is beautiful enough to stop traffic. But in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, I have to confess, so is every other person under the height of one meter. Not just those who agree to be seen and not heard. When my daughter gets cranky in a restaurant (and really, what do you expect at midnight?), the waiters flirt and bring her little presents and nearby diners look on with that sweet, wistful gleam of eye that before now I have only seen aimed at the dessert tray. Children are the meringues and eclairs of this culture. Americans, it seems to me now, sometimes regard children as a sort of toxic-waste product: a necessary evil, maybe, but if it's not their own they don't want to see it or hear it or, God help us, smell it.

If you don't have children, you think I'm exaggerating. But if you've changed a diaper in the last decade, you know exactly the toxic-waste glare I mean. It goes far beyond diapers. In the United States, I have been told in restaurants: "We come here to get away from kids." (This for no infraction on my daughter's part that I could discern, other than being visible.) On an airplane, I heard a man tell a beleaguered woman whose infant was bawling (as loudly as I would, to clear my aching ears, if I couldn't manage chewing gum): "If you can't keep that thing quiet, you should keep it at home."

Air travel, like natural disasters, throws strangers together in unnaturally intimate circumstances. Think how well you got to know the bald spot on the guy who reclined in front of you on some long flight. As a consequence, I think of airplanes as a splendid cultural magnifying glass. On my family's recent voyage from New York to Madrid, we weren't assigned seats together. I shamelessly begged my neighbor -- a forty-something New Yorker traveling alone -- if she would take my husband's seat in another row so our air-weary and plainly miserable daughter could stretch out across our laps. My fellow traveler snapped: "No, I have to have the window seat, just like you had to have that baby."

Her remark left me stunned and, as always happens when someone is remarkably rude to me, momentarily guilty. Yes, she's right, conceiving this child was a rash, lunatic moment of selfishness, and now I had better be prepared to pay the price.

In the United States, where people like to think that anyone can grow up to be President, we parents are left very much on our own when it comes to the little Presidents-in-training. Our social programs for children are the hands-down worst in the industrialized world, but apparently that is just what we want. In an Arizona newspaper, I remember seeing a letter from a reader incensed by the possibility of a school budget override. "I don't have kids," he declared, "so why should I have to pay to educate other people's offspring?" The budget increase was voted down, the school district progressed from deficient to dismal and one is inclined to ask that smug nonfather just whose offspring he expects to doctor the maladies of his old age.

Our nation has a proud history of lone heroes and solo flights, so perhaps it's no surprise that we think of child-rearing as an individual job, not a collective responsibility. I hold that view myself, apparently, for here in my new home I'm surprised when my daughter crash-lands in the playground and a sanguine Spanish stranger picks her up and dusts her off. When a shrieking bundle lands at my feet, I instantly look around for the next of kin. But I'm coming to see this detachment as perverse, when applied to children, and am wondering how it ever caught on in the first place.

In the natural world, it's understandable that the robin will roll out the eggs an interloping cowbird has laid in her nest and watch them splat on the ground. But we humans are supposed to distinguish ourselves by our broad-mindedness. My grandfather's family took in and raised a neighbor's orphaned children without a thought; in an era of shortage this was commonplace. One generation later, though, that kind of semipermeable household had vanished, at least among the white middle class.

Even in cases of formal adoption, the identity of an adopted child's birth mother was guarded like plutonium, as if the coming together of two different mothers -- matter and antimatter -- could explode the family universe. I know of an exceptional couple who recently adopted a baby, and along with the baby have more or less taken in the baby's 16-year-old mother and various of her friends and relations. I expect the baby will grow up blessed.

My second afternoon in Spain, standing on a crowded bus, as we ricocheted around a corner and my daughter reached starfish-like for stability, a man in a black beret stood up and gently helped her into his seat. In his weightless bearing I caught sight of the decades-old child, treasured by the manifold mothers of his neighborhood, growing up the way leavened dough rises surely to the kindness of bread. I thought then of the ungenerous woman on the plane, and as always happens two days after someone has been remarkably rude to me, I knew what I should have said to her: Be careful what you give children, or don't, for sooner or later you will always get it back.

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Did you read Emily Ratajkowski\u2019s viral essay? This week I delve into my perhaps controversial reaction to it, and my thoughts on her general figurehood, which I\u2019ve been wanting to write about for a while.

Last Tuesday, Emily Ratajkowski published a story in The Cut called \u201CBuying Myself Back: When does a model own her own image?\u201D In it she details the nefarious ways in which her image and personhood have been exploited throughout her modeling career\u2014by photographers, by artists, and by various men in her life. The story is well-written and at times heart-wrenching, and after reading it, I had a suspicion about how it would be publicly received, so I checked Twitter to see if I was right. Within seconds: a barrage of blue checks praising her as a brilliant and honest writer, implicating themselves as underestimating her because she\u2019s hot, and invoking the piece as if it were a powerful political statement.

In my vindication I felt unusually apathetic. My response to the piece was different, but I didn\u2019t hate it. I read it in one continuous gulp on a sunny bench while drinking an iced coffee and pretending, for five blissful minutes, that it was all I cared about. I\u2019d do it again! Had I then logged on to find a deluge of people shit-talking Emrata for not staying in her lane or whatever, I wouldn\u2019t have felt good about that at all. Nor do I want to be one of those people. But I do think she represents a very particular type of cultural figure, one worth examining and even criticizing as an exercise in understanding the role a person\u2019s stated ideals play in the pursuit of progress (especially as they contrast with action).

In reading the piece, my foremost emotion was disgust at the men who used her and a desire to protect her and women like her. I also enjoyed her prose and found the piece useful on the level of exposing a threatening side of celebrity most people would never think about. But close behind, by way of a few details that jumped out, was a suspicion of another agenda. There was the way she spoke about money: \u201CI was 23,\u201D she writes, \u201CI hadn\u2019t made enough money to comfortably spend $80,000 on art.\u201D (So she splits the cost with her boyfriend.) She later mentions she hadn\u2019t made as much money as she\u2019d hoped, and towards the end, that she couldn\u2019t afford to engage in a legal battle unless she were to sell a prized possession. These little comments are telling inclusions that hint at an awareness of class, but with a tone-deaf insistence on situating herself as an underdog within its context. Then there\u2019s the gratuitous inclusion of how much weight she lost during a particularly anxious period (\u201Cten pounds in five days\u201D)\u2014a detail that, given the flavor of \u201Cthinspo\u201D she regularly doles out, functions more effectively as a whistle for a vulnerable type of girl than genuine exposition.

These are small gripes, and I don\u2019t think they would necessarily be prohibitive to the soundness of her point (we all want to be the underdog; we\u2019ve all been poisoned by diet culture), except for the fact that, by the time I reached her conclusion, I got the sense that this piece wasn\u2019t so much about criticizing a system as it was a brand exercise for Emily Ratajkowski. Not necessarily by intention, but by impact. There is no broadening of her point to include people other than herself; there is no genuine analysis of the complexity of modeling (a profession that is literally defined by selling one\u2019s image) and female agency. There is no mention of actual copyright law, or the photographers and makeup artists and producers who helped create the image that she posted on her Instagram, who were also exploited by Richard Prince. The most interesting parts, where she paints herself as complicit in some way, are never further unpacked, and so seem included for extra honesty credit. It\u2019s not that I think she elided meaningful criticism in bad faith, or on purpose\u2014I think she did so compulsively, as an expression of her (and many people\u2019s) general approach to systemic change, which is to assume that by simply calling out a problem, or exploiting it in her favor, she takes away its power.

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