Happy 'bout you
The other day, my son said to me, "I'm happy 'bout you."
"You're happy about me?" I asked.
"I'm happy 'bout you playing with me, that's why I love you."
In high school and college, I had several memorable teachers who managed to sneak in endless anecdotes about all the adorable things their toddlers uttered.
One taught me AP Lit. She was incredibly tall and wore heels, always stylishly dressed, rocked a beautiful, snazzy afro and loved to accessorize with bright colors and whimsical patterns. She enunciated her instructions like we might all be hard of hearing or on the verge of falling asleep (some of us really were), and spoke with exclamation marks at the ends of her sentences.
She gave us our money's worth, as far as the rigor of a college-equivalent class was concerned. For exam prep we churned out essay after essay, by hand, in class. She demanded clearly-formulated (and legible!) theses and coherent paraphrases from dense sources texts (Crime and Punishment, Invisible Man, Moby Dick, The Stranger, and Siddhartha among others) within a mere 40-minutes. She advised we stock up on non-smearing pens, given the volume of writing we were expected to output in these regularly scheduled exams. She graded with a rubric that made many students weep.
But she certainly wasn't heartless, and this was obvious from the way she fawned over her son, who at the time was just at the cusp of finishing preschool.
"Oh, that reminds me of something so cute that my son said the other day..."
We often joked to each other that all her empathy was used up by her son; us humdrum students, who only had a faint notion of what love really meant, didn't stand a chance.
Another such teacher was my first linguistics professor in college. She was probably the youngest professor in that department, quite pale, and rocked a smart pixie cut. Our class was large, I think 140 students or more, taking up almost all the seats in the Dwinelle lecture hall. During the language acquisition section of the course, she would get visibly excited and include many examples of speech formation directly from her toddler, often quoted from just the night before. It was in that course that I first learned about the Chomskyan theory of universal grammar and got interested in the philosophy of language.
I remember sitting in that dusty lecture hall, projector whirring, staring at the slides and contemplating my professor's child's first, wobbly speech. I was 18. I remember feeling admiration for her, only faintly realizing the immense juggling act of managing her teaching load with such a small child at home.
I remember wondering if I would have any children of my own one day.
It's now been over two years since my son first began to talk, but I've only recently just started collecting his quotes in earnest. Partly because his thoughts were hardly coherent at the beginning, and partly because my old self, the one who loves to quote and collect these snippets of memories, is finally waking up again.
The thing that makes these bite-sized quotations so hard to write about, beyond a cute anecdote told in passing, is that they are necessarily over-simplistic. I drafted the bulk of this a long time ago; I sat on it because that day the process of writing had been interrupted by a horrifyingly inconsolable double nap-wake up rife with pitchy shrieking and head-banging and kicking. It felt disorienting to abstractly write about 'happiness' in the midst of such ordinary toddler and baby strife.
But the tantrums will pass; they always do. The fights will end. The tears and snot will be wiped away, and the hugs and smiles will return. And in the end, I still have my little quotes, too.
I'm quite happy 'bout you, too, my little son.