Baby Steps

There’s an anecdote in my family about how it’s a miracle I ever learned how to crawl. Evidently, about the time I was supposed to be learning how to strike out across the carpet on chubby hands and knees, our house in Florida had a flea infestation. Understandably, my mother was not too keen on putting her baby down on a floor quite literally hopping with fleas, so she carried me instead. It was not a great couple of weeks for the entire family, I’m told, particularly for our golden retriever. Eventually, though, I did learn to crawl, and with the help of the same golden retriever, I learned to walk. The story goes that I’d haul myself up by the hair of Cariad’s rump—a more patient, saintly dog there never was—and she would kind of slither forward, forcing me to walk to keep up. When I would face plant, as was inevitable, she’d scoot back towards me so I could once more take a hold and try again. My grandmother always liked to say our dog taught me how to walk.

I started wondering recently about why exactly I felt the need to crawl or walk. I imagine it had something to do with necessity—after the fleas were gone, and my mother put me down, I probably found it necessary to become my own means of travel from point A to point B. I have to wonder, though, if it’s something a little more adventurous—do we learn to walk as a sort of infantile version of Manifest Destiny? How far afield we travel as adults is often a function of resources and personality, but I’d imagine almost without exception, where a baby is able, that baby will learn to crawl. We don’t know how at first, but eventually we figure it out. With all of the research being done on babies, I wish there were a moment scientists could pinpoint when the sedentary baby looks around, sees the distance and how he or she is not in it, and thinks, “Well this will never do.”

My legs know how to walk now, largely without conscious coordination with my brain (watching where I’m walking, however, is a separate issue). It’s only one example of muscle memory: the actions you learn and earn until they can live latently in your muscles, waiting to be cued. I like to think that my muscle memories are one quirky facet of my personality and my history. I measure flour the way my sister does, tapping the dull edge of a knife across the cup measure’s rim. I twirl a pen between my index and middle fingers when I’m not paying attention—something I picked up from the debaters in high school English. I drive a standard, and whenever I’m in an automatic, my foot reaches for the clutch and comes up empty. My muscles simply remember.

I have another muscle memory that I became aware of recently, one that involves most of my insides between my collar bone and my hips. People talk about a sinking feeling; for me it’s more of a hollowing out, a quiet little whirlpool that forms somewhere around my stomach and expands from there. And it’s triggered by the same thing, over and over after so many years that no wonder my muscles remember: that exquisite moment when your crush is crushed. Since I learned that feeling, it’s grown with me; larger disappointments and high stakes make for bigger whirlpools.

I can’t think of love as a thing you experience only emotionally—I’m the type of person who occasionally feels the need to crank up the musical theater and dance around my apartment like an idiot. Waltzing along with Mitzi Gaynor is all well and good, but thus far I’ve only been able to waltz straight in to disappointment, with a greater or lesser sense of awareness as to my elation’s imminent demise. And so I fall flat on my face—I don’t think even our golden retriever, long since gone to the happy hunting ground, could help me up. The only thing left to do is pull myself up and try again. While my brain deals with the emotional fall out, my body goes through the motions of disappointment. It’s hard for me to tell if it makes me feel better or worse that the ache in my stomach is so familiar.

And again I have to wonder: when was that moment when I decided that being alone was just not good enough? I’m capable of being alone—I’ve gotten quite good at it, in fact—but there must have been a moment somewhere in my own emotional development, when like that sedentary baby I looked around and thought, “Well this will never do.”

I read an interesting article in the New York Times recently about the moral development of babies, and how some scientists have postulated that in order to learn and absorb morals, you have to have a relatively receptive blank slate. That is, you have to be preprogrammed to accept the knowledge by having some basic form of morality (or something like that). Is it that healthy legs are preprogrammed to walk, and our bodies somehow know it? Am I preprogrammed to offer up my heart to others? It is as if I was born with a series of muscle memories, things I do without even realizing it or even needing to learn how. Maybe the best way to define it is “instinct,” but the way I perform it feels a lot like memory.

The saying “if at first you don’t succeed” conflicts directly with that fact that I know insanity can be defined as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. I try, I fall, I pick myself up: I’ve done it so many times that the accompanying disappointment has its own muscle memory now, another unfortunate part of my personality and my history. Parents start getting worried if their baby isn’t walking by a certain age; sometimes I feel like I’m up against an unknown deadline after which I need to be happy and in love, or somehow dysfunctional. My brain flashes with a funny image: a baby on the floor, glancing up in irritation at anxious parents, wondering why he won’t walk. The baby thinks, “Chill out. I’m visualizing.”

Maybe that’s what I need to tell myself: chill, because maybe I’m just visualizing now, but I’ll probably figure it out eventually.