The word made flesh, the flesh made words

By Felix Carroll 

By slow degrees, year by year, octave by octave, our tones have descended from the atmospheric heights of upper-register parentese, the customary glissando, the child-directed speech that humans employ when encountering fragile, newly formed fellow beings.

"Whoo's ... thaaaaat ... baa-bee? Whoooo's ... my ... booy?" my wife and I would say, leaning toward our tiny child, selecting each word with a set of tongs.


Studies have shown nearly every culture talks this way to babies and that such talk helps form bonds and teach speech. In our own case, we've certainly formed a strong bond with our boy, even if, by bond, you only mean that he climbs into the car with us every time we're about to leave town. And by means of baby talk, we've certainly passed language on to him, such that he can tell knock-knock jokes all the way from the Berkshires to Boston.

First there was The Word, we are told in the creationist account. Or first there was the Big Bang, we are told by many evolutionists. Either way, first there was noise of some sort, which only makes sense. ...





We are resonant creatures in a resonant world. Just ask Pythagoras. Celestial bodies in orbit create an inaudible music that governs the rhythms of nature, he believed. When the noise is in harmony, it creates beautiful things, like an oak leaf, like a hand, like a cell and like an atom. When there's dissonance, you get doggerel and disease and disharmony and hydrogenated snack foods.

As parents, we experience Pythagoras' preferred system as sound -- in the guttural cry of a newborn. The only thing we can do in response is to retrofit our speech with a child-size voice box, a communicative catalytic converter that removes the toxicity of the world, summons the attention of a child and irritates most innocent bystanders.

So, mission accomplished. Our boy is about to turn 8 years old: Octo-Boy. He's over there at the kitchen table right now making birthday party invitations. In order to remain a harmonious household, my wife and I check our pitch. To speak to him in a bubbly blend of upper harmonics at this point in his life is to be a parent in need of testosterone injections.

But it's impossible not to think back to that day when my wife's and my voices first changed register, when he was simply zero-years old, the slimiest, smallest thing in the birthing room. We fixed our eyes upon his zero-shaped head as the zero-shaped clock began ticking, and now here we are. Our fragile little zero has become a kid with extracurricular activities, a kid with words, lots of words -- words he arranges then rearranges in an effort to explain everything.

There was a time when I could point and say to him, "Look, a zebra!" and he'd turn and look, then he'd look back at me and say "Where?" He'd understand I was kidding, and he'd laugh and laugh. These days if I say "Look, a zebra!" he'd give me a stone-faced stare that, in the world of bar fights, serves as a prelude to a head-butt. In fact, while some children no longer believe in the Easter Bunny, he no longer believes in zebras. "Dad, will you stop. There are no such things as zebras!" Oops.

Anyway, he expects more from words. Laughs no longer come as cheaply. You can't pull a quarter from his ears anymore. He'd prefer paper money from the nostrils. Soon, if he has his way, he'll seek to turn his stuffed animals into ammunition in a potato bazooka.

Still, he distributes kind words generously. "I love you, Daddy," he says at bedtime, and it's not perfunctory. I take him at his word, a word that creates space purified for an evening of silence.

Parentese in our home has almost entirely been dispatched with like so many bags of tiny sweaters and shoes. The dog's ears no longer spring upward like the doors of a DeLorian at every utterance. You'll hear us these days during a momentary lull in our lives:

"Henry," I'll say to my boy.

"Yes?" he'll say.

"Nothing."

"Henry," my wife will say.

"Yes?"

"Nothing."

"Cara," I'll say to my wife.

"What?"

"Nothing."

"Felix," she'll say to me.

"What?"

"Nothing."

This is our version of station identification. This is our attempt to find an appropriate domestic frequency that approximates the one my wife and I enjoyed up till the moment eight years ago when I looked at her lying there, sweaty and spent, and our new life began with The Word (actually Three Words): "It's — a —  boy," and thus began a years-long journey in which we harmonized with the cooing sounds of creation, even if we sounded like our pants were three sizes too small.