Most of us would feel something between sheepish to completely mortified if we threw up in front of someone else. Not this guy. This guy is shameless.
So when he stops eating and starts wiggling today –which I know by now is not a good sign– I sit him up, and yup, Willy hurls. I mean, hurls.
I'm holding one of those 50 cent IKEA towels up in front of him, and he just fills that sucker. So I'm sitting there holding a towel full of vomit, plus it's all over my left arm and all over the receiving blankets I've draped over the chair, but before I can even move, Willy — with stuff still dribbliing out of his mouth and rolling down his chin — turns to me and gives me a peaceful, heartwarming, absolutely beneficent smile.
I laughed till I cried. Oh, what bliss! To be 16 weeks old and shameless! To have no concept of "wrong," "bad," "uncool," or "improper." To not be embarrassed or ashamed of anything your body does as it goes about its appointed tasks.
In A Little Book on the Human Shadow, (HarperSan Francisco, 1988, page 17-18) Robert Bly uses stuffing a bag as a metaphor for what inevitably happens to our shadows as we grow older:
"When we were one or two years old we had what we might visualize as a 360-degree personality. Energy radiated out from all parts of our body and all parts of our psyche. A child running is a living globe of energy. We had a ball of energy, all right; but one day we noticed that our parents didn't iike certain parts of that ball. They said things like" "Can't you be still?" Or "It isn't nice to try and kill your brother." Behind us we have an invisible bag, and the part of us our parents don't like, we, to keep our parents' love, put in the bag. By the time we go to school our bag is quite large. Then our teachers have their say: "Good children don't get angry over such little things." So we take our anger and put it in the bag. By the time my brother and I were twelve in Madison, Minnesota, we were knows as "the nice Bly boys." Our bags were already a mile long.
"Then we do a lot of bag stuffing in high school. This time it's no longer the evil grownups that pressure us, but people our own age… I lied all through high school automatically to try to be more like the basketball players… out of a round globe of energy the twenty-year-old ends up with a slice. We'll imagine a man who has a thin slice left –the rest is in the bag– and we'll imagine that he meets a woman. Let's say they are both twenty-four. She has a thin, elegant slice left. They join each other in a ceremony, and this union of two slices is called a marriage. Even together the two do not make up one person!"
Then Bly goes on to say that since we spend the first halves of our lives putting stuff into the bag, to ever grow up we have to spend the second halves of our lives choosing what to pull back out of the bag. We have to do what everybody wants us to do when we're children, to belong to a culture. Then we have to go our own way later, to turn into individuals who can each think, create and contribute in their own way.
I'm feeling pretty delighted to be hanging out with someone who can still radiate in all 360 degrees. Thanks for your sunshine, Willy!
