Babies Aren’t Meant For Putting Down

The Italian word bombolotto doesn’t have a precise English translation. It means doll, toy baby, puppet, fat baby, happy baby, and all those things at once in a bouncy, onomatopoetic sort of way. It’s what the women on the street call out when they see something cherubic that must be pinched and clucked at until it gives up a giggle. It’s what the shopkeeper in the Spanish Quarter called my son before she indelicately scooped him out of my lap and paraded him into a ceramics store to meet a friend and, presumably, break her mugs.

She did not ask for permission, which bothered me, but bombolotti are a public good in Naples. Their cheeks are to be kissed and their arm rolls are to be fondled with admiration. They are a blessing. They reinforce an unspoken Italian spiritual covenant: Thou shalt covet, but only the very best things.

I supposed I should have refused to hand over my son to a stranger on a street in a foreign city known for crime, lava, and soccer stars, but the shopkeeper was in her 60s and slim in a sundress and sandals. My son, on the other hand, was 10 months old and 36.5 pounds — roughly an eighth the weight of a Roman crucifix circa anno Domini 33. Had she tried to pull a Simon of Cyrene and hump my burden off down the street, only divine intervention would have gotten her to the end of the block.

I was as certain of that as I was sore from carrying the kid.

My son was not born big or, for that matter, Italian. He arrived about a month early, sliced out of his preeclamptic mother and hoisted screaming into the hands of the OR nurse, 6-foot-5 easy, who’d been brought in to catch me if I fainted. He was just over 6 pounds and pissed. I grabbed him as soon as he was swaddled. He was the lightest heaviest thing I’d ever held. The same as a carton of milk. The whole weight of the world.

Then he got passed around.

His mother wanted to hold him and his aunt wanted to hold him and his grandparents wanted to hold him and his dog wanted to smell him and his neighbors wanted to hold him and our friends wanted to hold him and our friends’ kids almost dropped him and our best friend drove down from Boston to inspect him and make jokes and the guy at the pizza place (not Neapolitan) around the corner reached for him and suddenly it was October and he started to cough. He went from eating hesitantly to not at all. We took him in to the ER. He had RSV. He needed oxygen, which weighs 1/26,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 grams per atom.

My son was taken uptown, back to the hospital where he was born in an ambulance. His mother rode with him. I followed, carrying changes of clothes and diapers. By the time I arrived, he was a tiny shape on a big bed. He took little breaths. His mother whispered to him quietly and refused to sleep. She couldn’t hold him so she held herself over him. She wanted to make sure he saw her first every time he woke from his shallow, wheezing sleep. She didn’t sit for 36 hours. She held out. He didn’t cry. He didn’t even whine. He shivered and he wheezed and, when — days later — it was time to know if he was going to get better or worse, he got better. He took in more oxygen. He weighed a little bit more. So many fractions of a gram. Just that much, but enough.

Then he grew.

I kissed his swelling belly. I told him not to feel bad when we used a Q-tip to clean the fold between his thick neck and his barrel chest. When he outgrew his onesies, I congratulated him.

After he got home from the hospital for the second time, my son expanded. It happened quickly and in quasi-quarantine, so I didn’t notice until weeks later when I took him to the playground (an aspirational scene for a non-crawler) and realized he was the size of the 3-year-olds, albeit top heavy. A few days later, I carried him around the corner to get bagels. I made it back, but only just and without the cream cheese. I invested in a baby backpack. The straps dug in, sure, but I was relieved and proud.

Here was my son protecting himself in exactly the way I could not. When a pediatrician called him “robust,” I almost cried. That was my guy doing what he had to do. That was my son doing me one better.

It’s worth noting here that I am a perfectly average-sized American man — 5 feet, 11 inches after stretching and 180 pounds after foregoing dessert — despite having been a tiny, sickly, and disconsolate baby. I came out twisted and undercooked. I’m taller than my father and shorter than my father’s father, but I didn’t weigh 36 pounds until preschool and knew the smell of nitrile-vinyl exam gloves well before that. I didn’t want that for my son — not the surgeries, not the fevers. I encouraged him. I kissed his swelling belly. I told him not to feel bad when we used a Q-tip to clean the fold between his thick neck and his barrel chest. When he outgrew his onesies, I congratulated him.

My wife and I ordered new clothes and mapped an archipelago of places to put him down: the corner by the couch, but away from the piano; the bouncer; the dog bed by the front door; on the deck between the planters. But he still insisted on uppies and I (almost) never said no. Just after he turned 9 months old, I agreed to play a round of golf and found I could barely get my favored right arm through the cuff of a polo shirt. I hit a driver 280 yards. I hadn’t touched a club in 15 years.

The Italy trip was part-distraction and part-opportunity. Having suffered through a painful period of gainful employment, my wife and I found ourselves with some time to spare. We decided to spare it someplace warm by the sea. We figured we could hold our son in the water. We found a direct flight and a little stone house. But weight limits were a concern. The bags, yes, but also the baby. Cobblestones, bell towers, and old fortress stairs ruled out a stroller. I told my wife I could handle it. I had the backpack. I said it wouldn’t be a problem, but secretly suspected it would.

It was.

A few days in, my shoulders and back ached under the weight of our bombolotto, but the issue was elsewhere. I have 1.5 bad knees and 1.25 good ankles. I started to feel unsteady on uneven stradas. I was happy to let whomever wanted to hold my son have a few minutes while I got a seat and some acqua. By the time we made it to Matera, an old cave city that stands in for Jerusalem when Hollywood needs a Holy Land, I had to pass the bub. Guilty about offloading the boy, I sang him a song, a cover of the Gypsy King’s “Bomboleo” with that bouncy one-word refrain replaced by the only Italian parola I was absolutely sure I knew how to pronounce.

Bombolotto, bombolotto!

Porque mi vida yo la prefiero vivir así.

Bombolotto, bombolotto!

Porque mi vida yo la prefiero vivir así.

Catchy, but I still felt bad. I wanted to be the father holding the baby, not the father standing next to the mother holding the baby. Insecurity, sure, but also an understanding that I was going to have less time for that than the other dads. His little shirt, worn open down to his sternum out of respect for local culture, had been sewed with a 3-year-old in mind.

I wanted to be the father holding the baby, not the father standing next to the mother holding the baby.

We were gone for a month and, due to ceramic flooring, the Italian love of glass coffee tables, and poor packing, we rarely put him down. There were plenty of bombolotto moments during which his gummy grin afforded us a happy respite, but he mostly vacationed in our arms and laps, pulling himself up to peer over our shoulders, making eyes at swooning donne. Babies quickly learn where their ciabatta is buttered.

I carried him through Gallipoli, Bari, and Lecce. My wife carried him down to the porto and into and out of the water and into and out of the water and into and out of the water. The Adriatic was cold, which provided some relief, but our muscles still ached. That didn’t stop, but, after a while, we stopped thinking about it. His weight became something shared between us, a grasping isthmus connecting us. There was intimacy in that and then, when we let his new pinching and cooing friends hoist him, something intimate in that as well.

After a while, the shock of strange hands went away and we came around to the local way of thinking: A bombolotto is a public good. Their cheeks are to be kissed and their arm rolls are to be fondled with admiration. A bombolotto isn’t for putting down. He is for being passed back and forth, endlessly. He is robust. He can take it. He is a heavy blessing. He is the heaviest lightest thing.